New WoW Patch Brings Cross-Server Instances

ajs writes "World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion was staggered into 4 phases. The fourth and final phase, patch 3.3, was released on Tuesday. This patch is significant in that it will be the first introduction of one of the most anticipated new features in the game since PvP arenas: the cross-realm random dungeon, as well as the release of new end-game dungeons for 5, 10 and 25-player groups. The patch notes have been posted, and so has a trailer. The ultimate fight against the expansion's antagonist, the Lich King a.k.a. Arthas, will be gated as each of the four wings of the final dungeon are opened in turn — a process that may take several months. The next major patch after 3.3 (presumably 4.0) will be the release of Cataclysm, the next expansion."

Comments

Old

[Sobrique]

So.. basically what EVE has been able to do since release day?
Sure, it's a game that has flaws, but getting everyone in a single universe since day one is probably one of the best thing they ever did.

Re:Old

[Krneki]

There are technical limitations to how many people you can have one 1 server.

How many people can EVE handle in a single instance and how many can WOW?

P.S: Any news about the graphic engine update? Last time I tried WoW (1 year ago) it could only use 10-20% of the 2nd core.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not the same as Eve. Everyone in Eve plays on the same realm.

What WOW has done is extended dungeon instances to be cross server if your looking for a pickup group. They do this already with battlegrounds. Otherwise you play within your own realm.

My guess is to do some kind of load balancing as well. Because the previous patch the instance servers got overloaded due to people all wanting to try the new dungeons.

Re:Old

[dingen]

You don't get it. EVE doesn't have "instances". It's one giant instance. Every player is able to communicate and meet up with every other player at any time.

Re:Old

[daid303]

P.S: Any news about the graphic engine update? Last time I tried WoW (1 year ago) it could only use 10-20% of the 2nd core.

3.3 won't bring big GFX upgrades. Cataclysm might, but remember that WoW is also made to run on low end machines. I can run it on a 5 year old laptop at 10FPS on most locations. If you want a visually stunning game you are looking at the wrong one.

Re:Old

[__aatgod8309]

The only updated to the graphic engine that's expected is improved water shaders for cataclysm. It has better multicore support now, but don't expect it to max them out (or even to come close).

Re:Old

[Krneki]

Ok, how many player is EVE hosting?

Re:Old

[Krneki]

I don't need eye candy, I'd like to play at 60FPS. But since it uses only 1 core and 20% of the 2nd this is not possible unless you have a 4GHz CPU.

I'm talking when a lot of people are in the same place of course.

Re:Old

[AuMatar]

How many can Eve handle in a single zone? Not a heck of a lot, a big fleet battle locks out the entire sector. Eve manages it because it has a huge universe filled with 99.9% empty space that nobody wants to spend time in. You can't go shardless and have the kind of detailed world with a backstory that WOW has. The closest you can have to that is multiple versions and the ability to change between what version you're in ala guild wars.

Re:Old

[dingen]

There are about 300,000 subscribers and 45,000 trial accounts. Three days ago there were over 54,000 players online at the same time, which broke their previous record of 45,000 concurrent players earlier this year.

Re:Old

[dushkin]

Some missions are instanced.

Re:Old

[MORB]

Actually what they did in WoW is rather awful.

See, people aren't really sharing a single universe. They just do instanced content together. instanced content means that your party gets its own private copy of a level and do some dungeon crawling in there.

To implement that, they made it so that people teleport directly into the instance instead of having to travel in the open game world to the instance's entrance, because you can't see people from other servers in the open world.

Since there is also generally a very unhealthy focus on instanced content rather than open-world content, what it means in practice is that wow is not really a MMO anymore. People hang out in capital cities, which function as glorified lobbies like you find in non-MMO multiplayer games, they form a party and then teleport inside of a private dungeon.

You have almost no opportunity to meet random people on your adventures anymore because people of maximum levle have seldom any reason to bother ever going out in the open world. And leveling from 1 to 80 has also been made trivial and is therefore a minor part of the game.

It means that some interesting gameplay aspects that can normally be found in MMORPGs (such as open world pvp) have been pretty much set aside in WoW to make room for more soulless dungeon crawling and loot whoring. This game has turned from a MMORPG into a glorified dungeon crawling game.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true, you can be probed out and warped to.

Re:Old

[Rennt]

WoW is fairly basic, it doesn't need more then a single core running at sub 2GHz speeds. Giving it more will not increase your video performance.

If you are struggling to get decent FPS it is your video hardware you want to be looking at, not CPU utilization.

Re:Old

[obarthelemy]

I'd actually like to have the option to have even simpler graphics, and higher frame rates / more responsive gameplay.

Re:Old

[dushkin]

I stand corrected then.

Re:Old

[Goldberg's Pants]

Chuck a zero on the end of that first number, and change the 3 to at least a 6, then you have WOW. (And that's underestimating their current subscribers.)

Eve would burn to the ground if even half that number tried to use it.

Re:Old

[mwvdlee]

I can create an MMO which would host millions of players simultaneously on a single server.

It'd be pure text mode though, and the interaction would be limited to a "hit player X" button every few minutes or so.

Have fun!

So... what stuff does EVE lack that WOW has?

Re:Old

[AuMatar]

Fun

Re:Old

[Ricken]

Well... there's this HDR-mod you can try. It definitely doesn't help with multicore support, or fps for that matter. But it looks pretty cool.
http://projectlore.com/blog/world-of-warcraft-hdr-mod/

Re:Old

[mooglez]

Here you go:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1778017311&sid=1

i'd recommend setting it to value of 255, which means that the OS will handle the load balancing on all your cores

Re:Old

[Wildclaw]

So... what stuff does EVE lack that WOW has?

What you said, although not quite as extreme.

All single server, single instance, MMO games (Eve, Second Life, Muds) lack producer created non-generic content. When there is only a single instance of everything, there simply isn't enough producer time in the world to make up the content needed for everyone. At best, you can duplicate the same content with slight changes, but I have yet to see anyone do that successfully. All such attempts ends up with everything feeling generic and unsatisfying.

Of course, if you are into player created content, the above doesn't matter. But not everyone is.

Re:Old

[Fross]

If you want to play at 60FPS, run it on any hardware released in the last 5 years.

I ran it on a *laptop* from 2002, and it was still playable. Running it on an nVidia 6800 (launched early 2004), it pegged a solid 60FPS in all but the craziest raids.

Thinking you need a 4Ghz CPU to run WoW is ridiculous. Hell, you can probably buy a graphics card that runs it for less than the game itself.

Re:Old

[dingen]

And yet you can only communicate with how many other players on WoW? 1000 or something? At least on EVE you can interact with every other EVE player. I really feel this is a huge advantage. I know several people who play WoW and I would like to join them, but since they're all on different servers, I will have to choose one of my friends to play with and ignore the others. That is simply not acceptable and thus WoW fails for me as a platform for interacting with my friends, which seems to be it's main purpose.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you implying that you have over 1000 friends? And you are on slashdot?

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but I don't need to pick my friends based on their preferred server.

Re:Old

[Krneki]

I'm talking about "craziest raids", 40 man PvP and mayor cities 30min before the raid.

I want 60FPS or I don't play the game.

I get 30FPS while my CPU is at 60% load.

My video card is fine and never goes above 20%.

Re:Old

[Krneki]

I'll try thanks, but I doubt it will solve anything.
If the process is single thread all it will do is bouncing it around on all the cores, but it will never use more then 1 core at any given time.

Re:Old

[dingen]

No, I have friends on multiple servers, which means WoW doesn't allow me to interact with them all. Even with two friends this is a problem.

Re:Old

[Xveers]

EVE can handle over one thousand players in a single system/"zone". Places like Jita (THE trade hub of EVE) regularily pass 1300 concurrent active users at one time. In one star system. Admittedly though the vast majority of Jita players are "passing through" or conducting trade and not shooting each other in the face. Star systems out in the areas of space where players create their own empires can have fleet battles that push past 400 people per side, though admittedly there are occurences of heavy lag. In the past (IE one year ago or more) this would be instead extreme lag to the point of killing the node. In the last year however they have implemented heavy server and database optimizations that are pushing the boundary of stable large group combat higher and higher. I wish I could have better references, but I know several battles have been fought that were past 300v300 and were done with a minimum of lag (the reason I remember this is because of the comments wondering WHERE the lag was). CCP devs have also stated that they've just begun major DB optimization and they expect greater improvements to come. Of course, that's them selling their product, but they do recognize it is a major issue, and they ARE working towards correcting it. To turn the question on its head, how many people can a single WOW server handle, in one instance, in one specific zone? All PVPing against each other or providing remote support in one manner or another? Personally I'd be suprised if that number was any higher than what EVE is currently capable of.

Re:Old

[X0563511]

As well... how long have various players of EVE been around?

The game has staying power. I can only handle WoW for a month or two at a time.

Amusement Park vs Sandbox

Guess which one gets old fast?

Re:Old

[X0563511]

life jackets, bumpers, and seatbelts?

Re:Old

[SanityInAnarchy]

Eve would burn to the ground if even half that number tried to use it.

I wouldn't count on that. In particular, I'd look into how they've managed (with some success) to support what they have.

Eve would've burned to the ground a long time ago if they couldn't scale.

I'm not laying they could become WoW overnight. I'm saying they're at least trying, whereas Blizzard doesn't seem to care.

Re:Old

[SanityInAnarchy]

All single server, single instance, MMO games (Eve, Second Life, Muds) lack producer created non-generic content. When there is only a single instance of everything, there simply isn't enough producer time in the world to make up the content needed for everyone. At best, you can duplicate the same content with slight changes...

So, I've read this several times, and I can't find you even examining procedural content long enough to dismiss it. I don't know if Eve uses it -- in fact, I very much doubt it -- but it also seems like Eve would be the perfect game for it.

Re:Old

[jaggeh]

I too play eve, and have also played wow while training a 90 day skill ;)

I took part in a pvp raid that had roughly 100 people between both sides. The lag was unbearable and people were 'warping' around the area and 'rubberbanding' a LOT.

Over my 4 years playing eve I have only seen the lag situation getting better. In the Last year I have been involved in many lag-free 400+ player battle.

---

As said the benefit of eve over wow is the lack of sharding and sandbox nature. the attraction to wow is it's ease to play and casual side.

May it stay that way because frankly I wouldn't want eve to have x million subscribers because that would force CCP to pander to the lowest common denominator and dumb down the game.

Re:Old

[Opportunist]

Eat shit! A few thousand billion flies can't be wrong!

Re:Old

[American Terrorist]

The fact is that most people don't actually want to play a "massively" multiplayer online role-playing game. They (and I) want to play a multi-player online game. I loved playing Unreal and BF1942, but if they somehow made servers that could handle 100,000 people I wouldn't want to play on them. It's just too many people. Blizz and other companies try to find a balance between too many players in one place, and not enough. I think they have succeeded in that I can usually find a group to go wherever, and don't lag out when I zone into the capital cities.

As far as world PVP goes, please, they tried that. It always just devolves into zerging, whoever has the most people always wins. If your server is 75% alliance, world PVP is going to be pretty meaningless/frustrating if you're horde. The only way to make it fun is to try and make sure the same number of people fight each other at the same time, which is what battlegrounds and arenas are for.

Finally your assertion that WoW is a glorified dungeon crawling game strikes me as baseless, given that I spend ~20% of my time going to dungeons and 80% having fun killing people in battgrounds/arenas. WoW to me is like TFT2, but with swords and magic instead of guns.

Re:Old

[AlXtreme]

It means that some interesting gameplay aspects that can normally be found in MMORPGs (such as open world pvp) have been pretty much set aside in WoW to make room for more soulless dungeon crawling and loot whoring.

This really is a pity. During the early days of WoW there were plenty of open world PvP battles between the factions (Crossroads?): they were fun, simple to get involved with, frantic and you end up meeting dozens of new people in the midst of battle. Much more fun than the high-end raiding, IMHO.

They should have promoted this type of pvp (by fixing the numbers issue, having objectives, gaining control over areas) instead of creating separate arena's where you duke it out and impact nothing in the world.

Then again, I've left long ago. Good riddens.

Re:Old

[MORB]

"The fact is that most people don't actually want to play a "massively" multiplayer online role-playing game. They (and I) want to play a multi-player online game."
Then why not play such a game in the first place instead of playing a different type of game and waiting until its publisher ends up into turning it into the kind of game you want?

"As far as world PVP goes, please, they tried that. It always just devolves into zerging, whoever has the most people always wins."
No, it doesn't always devolve into zerging. The moments I enjoyed best in the game were doing small scale world pvp.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

No, in EVE each solar system is effectively a different instance. The only real difference to WoW is that you move between instances as you move around the game, and it doesn't deliberately prevent communication between players in different instances.

Re:Old

[Sobrique]

Sort of. EVE has mission and exploration mechanics, which are 'on the fly' created, but I believe they're based out of a library of such things, and have a locational distribution system (e.g. you get a particular kind of exploration site show up in a particular region of space).
But really, the whole point of EVE is that the 'content' is the players - everything (pretty much) links into the evolving political and economic dynamics of the playerbase - you make a profit by finding sources of demand and supplying it. Or creating it in the first place.
Maybe you crash in on an alliance that's collapsing, and take advantage of it, or maybe you bolster and existing conflict to tip the power balance. Maybe you join the alliance and _create_ that power balance in the first place. But certainly, where you get combat happening, no NPC AI can ever beat another player in terms of sneakyness and deviousness.

Re:Old

[Sobrique]

As well... how long have various players of EVE been around?

Well, I'm a month or two short of 5 years. (My accounts have been active the whole time, even if I have got sidetracked for a few weeks at a time to play other games)

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow is multi-threaded.
The implementation might not be "proper", but it does use several cores simultaneously on my quad-core cpu after adjusting the affinity.

Re:Old

[rodrigoandrade]

> That is simply not acceptable and thus WoW fails for me as a platform for interacting with my friends, which seems to be it's main purpose.

Fail. WoW's main purpose is to be an online RPG. If you want to interact with your friends, you use some crap like Facebook.

Re:Old

[Rakshasa Taisab]

What? You're saying EVE would burn to the ground if 5000 players tried to use it? (half the number on a wow server)

Sorry to tell you this but it's already broken 54k online users, which is ten times what a WoW realm handles.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

some interesting gameplay aspects that can normally be found in MMORPGs (such as open world pvp)

Open world PVP is not interesting, and has never been interesting. I played WoW extensively in the early days on a PVP server. 99% of open world PVP consists of one of the two following scenarios:

1. Higher level person ganks lower level person. Lower level person stands no chance.
2. Group of people gank smaller group/single person. Smaller group/single person stands no chance.

I don't know what you consider "interesting," but I prefer scenarios in which the most skilled competitors win, and not the players who have simply spent more time in the game (to get a higher level) or brought more friends along.

Re:Old

[asCii88]

WoW's main purpose is to be an online RPG. If you want to interact with your friends, you use some crap like a pub.

There, fixed it for you.

Re:Old

[mooglez]

You might also want to disable core parking as instructed in this other thread:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=20677771277&sid=1

I haven't done this myself, but i did notice a large performance jump when i set the processAffinityMask to 255 on my i7 860 setup

Re:Old

[Krneki]

Good to know.

Re:Old

[Krneki]

Is any of your core maxed when you play WoW? If it isn't the game is just bouncing the process across the CPU cores.

Re:Old

[dingen]

Fail. WoW's main purpose is to be an online RPG.

WoW is not a game because it lacks a basic aspect of a game: you can't lose.

It's a social platform. Nothing more, nothing less.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont think you understand what an instance is. Every system in EVE is a instance, as well as every wormhole.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, it's a game that has flaws,

Like daily downtime.

They depend on 3rd party sites to prove reasonable search ability to their forums.

Difficult to find people of a similar level to PvP.

Game centered around unbalanced combat.

Re:Old

[mqduck]

You don't happen to have a Buddy Program invite you could spare, do you?

Re:Old

[jaraxle]

And this is something that SoE at least did right. While EQ and EQ2 all have multiple servers per game, same as WoW has, you can easily communicate across servers by appending the server name to the character name when you send a /tell. As well, you can create player-channels cross-server in similar fashion.

In fact, you can even communicate cross-game between EQ and EQ2 by appending the game name in front of the server name. While it's not as easy as EVE, since EVE is one server total, it's still better than nothing. Never mind the fact that their latest game launcher includes a sort of IM client that allows you to talk with friends in-game without being in-game yourself (even includes voice chat for guilds). I really can't believe other multi-server MMO's haven't implemented something like EQ/EQ2's cross-server messaging.

~jaraxle

Re:Old

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

"As of May 6, 2009, Eve Online has more than 300,000 active subscriptions and 45,000 active trial accounts."

World of Warcraft has over 12,000,000 active subscriptions and hundreds of thousands of active trial accounts.

Re:Old

[Jedi Alec]

How is that? Aside from i think some of the tutorial missions that have been locked down from intruders, pretty much anything else can be found and entered by other players.

Re:Old

[realityimpaired]

And if you lose in something like FarCry, you reload a previous save and continue again. How, exactly, is that different from being resurrected in game? A rez is just a way of handling that "ok, I died, time to reload" in a persistent environment where resetting to a previous state isn't possible.

If you want to have an argument against WoW being a game, then you should look more at the fact that there's not really an end goal in the game. Once you've completed all the quests, done all the dungeons, etc., you can still play. You can repeat content. You can try hard modes on content. You can wait until the next content comes out so that you can play through that. But there isn't actually an *endpoint* to the game, which is something that most single player games have.

Re:Old

[GundamFan]

Only in my experience EVE is a massive world where it is damn hard to find and play with anyone on any kind of casual level. maybe if they fix that I'll give it another try.

Re:Old

[dingen]

WoW not having a lose condition is not the only reason why it isn't a proper game. You are right about the lack of a win condition either. This is exactly why Far Cry is a game and why WoW is not: altough the resurrection is some what similiar to loading a saved game, you can actually win a game of Far Cry by making it through the story. Same goes with games like Zelda.

I realise there is no single definition of what a game is, but most of the attributes commonly associated with a game are not present in WoW. Things like quests or raids could be called games, but WoW itself is more like a social platform to host these games. Basically, WoW is Facebook.

Re:Old

[realityimpaired]

You do realise that TV and movies are only shot at 30fps, right?

Don't judge something based on a number, use a qualitative judgement: does the picture look smooth, or is it jerky. If it's jerky, you have something to complain about. But you might want to look closer to home when you're trying to figure out what's wrong: I get 60fps even in Dalaran on my 2-year old laptop, which is powered by a T5450 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 256MB GeForce 8600M GT, with gaming being done under Windows 7 x64. During end-game raid content (think the Yogg Saron fight, and I was in Icecrown Citadel yesterday), I still get 50-60fps. If you're seeing smaller numbers, then you have something wrong with your computer.

Re:Old

[mooglez]

If you're seeing smaller numbers, then you have something wrong with your computer.

like.. using a higher resolution than you are?

(2560*1600 here)

Re:Old

[xTEMPLARx]

World PVP, imo, is the best, as it's spontaneous and more interesting. It's more "immersive" when you are questing in a zone and you run up on a horde and both of you make that decision of whether or not to attack. Oh, and you left out another scenario: higher level ganks lower level who stood no chance, who then logs out, grabs his higher level toon and perhaps a few of his buddies to come back and wreck shop and seek revenge.

Keep in mind that, just because something isn't fun to YOU, doesn't mean the very same thing isn't way fun to someone else. That's one of the reasons WoW succeeds even when its not always perfect. There's something for everybody in there to enjoy provided you're not focusing on the finger and missing all the heavenly glory (my apologies to Bruce Lee).

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

WoW doesn't allow you to interact with them all, yet, but it will. Battle.net 2.0 will allow this when it (hopefully) comes out next year with Starcraft 2.

Re:Old

[H0p313ss]

It means that some interesting gameplay aspects that can normally be found in MMORPGs (such as open world pvp) have been pretty much set aside in WoW to make room for more soulless dungeon crawling and loot whoring.

No, it has not been set aside. They have simply made it easy for those people who are already instance grinding to do so easily. Instance grinding has always been "soulless dungeon crawling and loot whoring".

Personally I'm on the last stages of equipping a character for raiding and the ability to go from instance to instance worked great for me yesterday, as it did for everybody I grouped with. I did not hear a single negative comment from anyone yesterday. (And we all know how much players bitch when they don't like a new patch.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understand what an instance is. Every system in EVE is a persistent environment. I'm not going to take a gate to Jita and be alone in my very own copy of the system.

Re:Old

[D'Sphitz]

Eve and WoW are COMPLETELY different games, they're not even comparable.

However, I have been always annoyed at the seemingly extremely low number of simultaneous players that can play on a WoW realm. Even when the servers are full most of the zones are empty.

Re:Old

[xTEMPLARx]

What good is a game whose server system allows everyone to be on the same server at the same time if the game isn't worth playing?

Re:Old

[dingen]

Yeah, and with how many of those millions of users can you actually interact while "playing" WoW? Only a fraction of the amount of people online in EVE right now. WoW having a lot of users is of no consequence whatsoever, because you only interact with the folks in your realm, which is never more than a few thousand. In WoW, you are not aware of the millions of other players at all.

Re:Old

[dingen]

It's the social aspect of MMORPG's that is the main appeal. Gamewise neither EVE nor WoW are very good imho.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

You have almost no opportunity to meet random people on your adventures anymore...

Yea, only if they implemented some type of Random Cross Realm group making where you going a queue to find random players for a dungeon. But alas, only a pipe dream.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the point that should have been driven at is:
World of Warcraft, being an online game that one can share with friends, even if they're not sitting in the same room as you, is just too aggravating to do just that.

I don't play WoW, but I'm guessing that it's roughly the same issue as Lord of the Rings Online, in that I play on Landroval server in the US, but a friend who joined and forgot to ask me what server I was on chose, say... Nimrodel, because he has more friends that are already over there, but also wanted to play with me.

This forces one to choose who they can play with, and as one progresses in levels, they don't always want to re-grind the same quests again on another server, when they can crank out quests with now established characters on one.

Otherwise, what, really, is the point of paying $5, $10, $15, $100 a month to play a game online, when you could just buy something for $40 and be done with the expense?

Re:Old

[artemis67]

Not being able to "lose" would apply to ALL MMORPG's, not just WoW. If you were to "lose" the entire game then the developer would lose a subscriber, and they definitely don't want that.

Win/lose in MMORPG's is done on a much smaller scale -- i.e., each quest and each battle presenting an opportunity to win/lose.

Re:Old

[Orbijx]

For EVE?
Hell, I have one if you need it.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, have you ever lead a 25 man PUG run? I have seen it take 15-20 minutes just to get everybody in the instance for whatever combination of reasons. Now that people will be able to teleport straight into the instance, hopefully such runs will be much quicker.

Additionally, I expect the cross-server instancing to be helpful for early birds. There's no way you can find a reasonably good PUG group in many realms early in the morning if that's when you happen to be on.

The one thing I do see getting taken away is meeting strong players on your realm through PUG runs, which are good to have on your friend's list, and open the doors for guild recruitment.

Re:Old

[Wildclaw]

So, I've read this several times, and I can't find you even examining procedural content long enough to dismiss it. I don't know if Eve uses it -- in fact, I very much doubt it -- but it also seems like Eve would be the perfect game for it.

Actually, I did try to imply procedural content and other similar methods with with "you can duplicate the same content with slight changes". Now in hindsight, "slight changes" may have been somewhat badly worde, but my conclusion still stands. All such attempts ends up with everything feeling generic and unsatisfying. That isn't to say that procedural content can't be used to speed up content generation. But without a great amount of work by actual artists/designers, you simply don't get something worthwhile. At least with the current state of technology. We never know what the future brings.

Re:Old

[Idiomatick]

World PVP was not killed by zerging ganking or imbalance. It was killed by server capacity.

I've personally organized a few 300+ person raids. The 1st time was terrible, the server went down and you couldn't log back in for 20minutes, when you did you were likely dead due to the 5x1 ratio at the time. It was meaningless to set proper teams/raids because it would never stay up that long.

2nd time I tried hitting every alliance city at once. This worked in the minor cities, mostly... since less defenders came. But by the time fighting was nicely under way the whole continent DCs.

World pvp was ruined because it is not actually possible. It has nothing to do with balance, you never get that far.

Re:Old

[dingen]

It's not about losing everything. Being able to die is not required to be qualified as a game in my book. But some form of failure is.

In WoW, you can never fail at anything. You can always try again, without being set back at all. In EVE at least people can steal your stuff when your ship is destroyed. This makes you want to prevent being destroyed. In WoW nobody cares if their character dies, because it has no consequence.

Re:Old

[Maria D]

Different people focus on different aspects of the game as large as WoW. I believe your experiences are valid - within the set of playing activities you experience yourself. Please don't over-generalize it to everybody, though. PvE and RP servers (or players) won't be affected as much, because world PvP has never been a big part of their gaming. Guilds raiding progression content will still raid together, because it takes consistent grouping - and their realm-specific social networks will stay within realms because of it. Arena teams, as well, are realm-based. Wintergrasp is a rather popular, successful way to make outdoors PvP meaningful and concentrated in time and space, and it won't get any worse.

The only minus I see for my style of playing is the inability to form Friends list cross-realm and to chat with friends from other realms. I usually add to my Friends list from groups I pick up. I hope Blizzard implements these options soon. They already made a step toward it with cross-realm Ignore list.

Re:Old

[Maria D]

EVE does have instances (for solo), or at least it had something similar back when I played. Also, EVE can't accommodate ten million people on one server. Maybe some years down the road, with some technology advances (cloud computing?) and significant game redesign, it may somehow become possible... But not yet.

Re:Old

[Idiomatick]

WOW servers cap at 30,000 people... they lag like shit at 25,000. Here is the big thing though, >600 players moving in one map will crash the server in wow. In eve there have been BATTLES involving >600 people at once that occur with minimal to no lag over 4~5hour periods.

In any case 54,000 players at once is already an achievement.

Re:Old

[Maria D]

Are you claiming all ROLEPLAYING activities are not games? In this case, your definitions are not widely shared.

There are many classes of games that don't involve losing, and some that don't involve winning either. Cooperative games, roleplaying games, artistic games are some examples of genres that don't involve winning or losing.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not decided yet on whether I like xrealm instances or not, however with respect to yesterday: You were able to get in? O.o

I was with a scheduled 10 man raid and we sat around for 1 hour trying to get in but no instances were available. Ontop of that the loading screen froze each of us trying for about 2 minutes. It was a pretty frustrating experience. Maybe it's time for instance queues? Ugh. :(

The problem probably was that any xreal instance had an automatic queuing process while us noobs trying to set up a local raid had no shot at "beating the machine" get get our instance created. Which reinforces MORBs comment that they fucked local gameplay up. (Granted, this won't be permanent -- but still).

And yes, I know that we should know better then to expect to do anything useful on patch day. However, Blizzard should be able to do better esp. with the staggering budget they have on this game.

Re:Old

[Vohar]

I'm not laying they could become WoW overnight. I'm saying they're at least trying, whereas Blizzard doesn't seem to care.

Blizzard doesn't care about what? Becoming what they already are?

People love throwing around the "they don't care" rhetoric. Here we have an article about some features that are totally new to the genre(playing with people on other servers most notably) and the same old garbage is being repeated.

Blizzard's done a lot to come up with new ideas. The game's default UI has gone through some dramatic advances in the past 5 years, all from player feedback. How about the detractors start coming up with something new too, instead of just repeating the same old crap?

Re:Old

[Idiomatick]

Non laggy fights in wow cap at 120v120 ~ 160v160 tops depending on the day (and that causes heavy lag). 300v300 causes the entire realm to go down disconnecting every player for 15minutes.

To be fair though blizz is improving this number. They had to with wintergrasp (allows 120v120 fights). Not that they are improving huge battles but they are making 120v120 not horribly laggy so I assume they'll learn from the experience.

Re:Old

[KnownIssues]

WoW is not a game because it lacks a basic aspect of a game: you can't lose.

By what definition? The Wikipedia article for Games has an extensive list of definitions of game from various sources and games experts. None of them list the ability to lose as a condition. Almost any condition given on that page is met by WoW. So, I thought you must be getting technical and be referring to game theory, but even the article for Game Theory gives infinitely-long games as a type of game.

WoW is a game. Among other reasons, it is not merely a social platform because: it is governed by rules, there are goals, and it uses a combination of skills, strategy, and luck.

Re:Old

[CaptSlaq]

"The fact is that most people don't actually want to play a "massively" multiplayer online role-playing game. They (and I) want to play a multi-player online game." Then why not play such a game in the first place instead of playing a different type of game and waiting until its publisher ends up into turning it into the kind of game you want?

"As far as world PVP goes, please, they tried that. It always just devolves into zerging, whoever has the most people always wins." No, it doesn't always devolve into zerging. The moments I enjoyed best in the game were doing small scale world pvp.

Ah, the days of Hillsbrad Foothills world PVP: Tarren Mill vs Southshore: cap the flight master for a win. Fun times...

Re:Old

[bdenton42]

At least on EVE you can interact with every other EVE player.

Must make choosing names a chore if everyone is on the same "server". It's already hard enough to come up with a name without goofy special characters or random sequences of letters in WoW.

Re:Old

[CaptSlaq]

World PVP was not killed by zerging ganking or imbalance. It was killed by server capacity. I've personally organized a few 300+ person raids. The 1st time was terrible, the server went down and you couldn't log back in for 20minutes, when you did you were likely dead due to the 5x1 ratio at the time. It was meaningless to set proper teams/raids because it would never stay up that long. 2nd time I tried hitting every alliance city at once. This worked in the minor cities, mostly... since less defenders came. But by the time fighting was nicely under way the whole continent DCs. World pvp was ruined because it is not actually possible. It has nothing to do with balance, you never get that far.

I can speak to some truth of this statement. Before Burning Crusade, I was involved in a 6 raid group (40x6) Horde raid on Ironforge. We brought down the server, before the main group could make it to Magni, but managed to get a handful of warlocks into one of the unoccupied buildings inside IF. They then summoned in a group that killed Magni, after the server recovered. The scale was epic. So was the lag, and the eventual server crash.

Re:Old

[magamiako1]

You're right, but only technically. Eve *does* have instances--there are missions that DO instance you off from the rest of the player base.

Not to mention, the way Eve's warping system works, is that not every character is on the same set of servers as they move between zones. They achieve this with the warping stuff they have in the game.

The equivalent you can get to in WoW is that WoW has 4 continents. Each continent is set on its own server. You also have the "instance" servers, which handle battlegrounds, arenas, dungeons, and raids. They also have the chat server.

A) WoW is split up so the following happens:

If Northrend's server goes down, players in Azeroth, Outlands, and Eastern Kingdoms are not affected.

B) All players on a downed/crashed server can still maintain 100% communication with each other via the chat channels.

WoW did this to maintain the open world look and feel. They could accomplish something similar by placing loading screens between every zone in the game, but that defeats the purpose of making the game truly "open world" to begin with.

Guild Wars, at least when I played it, treated cities as lobbies. There were maybe 20 different copies of a city, and you were auto balanced into one or the other, but could optionally choose to port to another lobby of the city to facilitate trading. When you did missions, the missions are all instanced off.

Re:Old

[dingen]

I agree largely with Chris Crawford's definition of a game.

By this definition, roleplaying activities are indeed not games. Neither are racing games, Tetris, SimCity or Super Mario Bros.

Re:Old

[dingen]

It's not harder to come up with a good name in EVE than it is to register a new GMail account.

Re:Old

[cfalcon]

I don't buy this assessment at *all*. You can still fly around the world, help random people completing quests, find people hanging out ready to go into dungeons, and kill the opposing faction (pvp server). The coolness of dungeons would NOT be possible to implement as "open world content", because in that case you have a big guild, and they kill all the content. If you are in the same faction as them, you can suck up to them, but if they are the opposite faction they'll just roll right over you and aoe you down like so many trash packs.

In other words, the mechanics of the fight would take a VERY distant backseat to political bickering about scarce resources.

Though, I would very much love another Isle of Quel, for the world pvp that happened as everyone did their daily quests. That was very fun.

Re:Old

[MORB]

That, and also playing hide and seek with the groups of vigilantes trying to take revenge on you for ganking people doing their daily quests on quel'danas, etc.
There's lot of fun to be had with free form pvp.

Re:Old

[bonch]

You honestly believe WoW servers only have 10,000 users each? Have you visited realms like Mal'ganis lately?

Also, WoW has a lot more action happening than EVE, which requires more network traffic.

Re:Old

[realityimpaired]

I'm at 1680x1050... yes, it's a lower resolution, but not as much lower as you might think.

However, I still think you're completely missing my point: complaining a game is unplayable because you're getting 40fps instead of 60fps is utterly ridiculous: you don't refuse to watch TV or movies because they're unwatchable, and they're at 30fps.

Re:Old

[bonch]

You actually believe Blizzard should host 12,000,000 players on one server at the same time? And why is it so important to you that you be able to communicate with every single person logged into the game, anyway? WoW having a lot of users is not "of no consequence whatsoever." Just one high population WoW server has more active players than you'll find in all of EVE.

Re:Old

[bonch]

It's not hard to avoid lag when all that's going on is moving little static ship models around. There isn't even physical terrain with obstacles and line-of-sight to check for.

I really can't believe EVE fans are even trying to make this comparison.

Re:Old

[bonch]

There's a lot more going on in WoW than in EVE, which is just static ship models drifting around. WoW is essentially a 3D action game with terrain and line-of-sight, and you have to deal with all the network traffic and server-side processing that entails.

Re:Old

[dingen]

Blizzard's done a lot to come up with new ideas.

The problem is that most innovations from Blizzard are geared towards getting more players to subscribe and keeping them subscribed in order to generate money, instead of greating an actual good and fun game.

Not that money is a bad motivation for creating a game. But I think Blizzard is putting the improvement of their business model above the improvement of the game itself.

Are there other games out there that benefit from the innovations created by Blizzard?

Re:Old

[dingen]

Eve *does* have instances--there are missions that DO instance you off from the rest of the player base.

Only a few tutorial missions and only for the purpose of protecting the player from being destroyed while still learning the game.

Re:Old

[MORB]

"The coolness of dungeons would NOT be possible to implement as "open world content", because in that case you have a big guild, and they kill all the content. If you are in the same faction as them, you can suck up to them, but if they are the opposite faction they'll just roll right over you and aoe you down like so many trash packs."

That would make it a challenge, which would actually make the entire thing much cooler. Dungeons in wow are not challenging, clearing them is merely a ritual you need to accomplish to get to roll on the loot.

The only times I ever had fun in a dungeon in a MMO was camelot castle in anarchy online (which was otherwise not that good).

It was a public dungeon with a set of pvp enabled set of corridors, rooms and a final room with a dragon. It meant that people from your own faction had to work together to take control of the place over the opposite faction and keep defending it while another group went and killed the dragon.

So many people were involved that you had little chance to win any of the loot rolls but people were going there for the sheer fun of it. It could have used a slightly lower limit of the number of players allowed in the place but it was pretty good.

Re:Old

[Sobrique]

1/ yeah, fair point 2/ so what? A search is a search 3/ No. 4/ No.

Re:Old

[Sagara Sozou]

I know several people who play WoW and I would like to join them, but since they're all on different servers, I will have to choose one of my friends to play with and ignore the others. That is simply not acceptable and thus WoW fails for me as a platform for interacting with my friends, which seems to be it's main purpose.

Yeah, real life fails me for the exact same reason.

Re:Old

[dingen]

You actually believe Blizzard should host 12,000,000 players on one server at the same time? And why is it so important to you that you be able to communicate with every single person logged into the game, anyway?

I don't care how it's handled technically, but if I'm playing WoW and someone I know is playing WoW, then we should be able to meet and talk. This is currently not possible, unless we happen to have our characters on the same server, which is extremely unlikely. Especially since I have more than 1 friend and my friends are spread out over multiple servers. It comes down to choosing which of my friends I want to play with, even though they all are online and playing the same game as I am.

WoW having a lot of users is not "of no consequence whatsoever." Just one high population WoW server has more active players than you'll find in all of EVE.

It doesn't matter how many players are active in a particular game. What matters is that when I'm online, I should be able to communicate with every other person playing. That is the essence of a social platform. If I tell someone I'm playing EVE and he/she is also playing EVE, then we can team up and play together. This doesn't work in WoW, because everybody is spread out over different servers which don't communicate with each other, so I'm not aware of my friends in-game existence, even though we're playing exactly the same game.

Imagine Facebook would work like that. "Hey, I'm on Facebook, you too?" "Yeah man, add me as your friend! Oh wait, you're on a different Facebook server... never mind." You think that's acceptable too?

Re:Old

[Lulfas]

According to the current marketing material, 11 million people play WoW worldwide. Less than 350.000 play Eve. I guess we know which one gets old fast.

Re:Old

[dancingmilk]

Realms tend to have populations in the tens of thousands. The realm I used to play on was sitting at 20,000 or so. Even given that you can only communicate with your faction, on my realm I can communicate with 10,000+ people. That's on one realm...

Re:Old

[kalirion]

To be fair, while a steady 30fps is perfectly playable, constantly bouncing between 30fps and 60fps is harder to get used to.

Re:Old

[Sycon]

I think everyone comparing WoW to Eve is missing a critical point... the very nature of Eve makes it significantly easier to maintain a large number of people within a single shard. In Eve the world is very large, providing a separation between players that allows the server to cut down on traffic. Not only that, but there are an extremely limited number of AI controlled characters, or in general moving environmental items. The environment WoW is in has a significantly higher level of complication in terms of data to keep track of, thus a much smaller population is supported on a single server.

Re:Old

[dingen]

WoW doesn't allow you to interact with them all, yet, but it will.

Great, now Blizzard sounds like Microsoft :-P

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh, but Vent does. And Bliz allows you to have toons on up to 10 servers. And if you don't want to do a lot of grinding, just roll a DK on their server.

Re:Old

[bdenton42]

1. Higher level person ganks lower level person. Lower level person stands no chance.
2. Group of people gank smaller group/single person. Smaller group/single person stands no chance.

I was really hoping that they would make Cataclysm an individual story progression (like Crusader's Pinnacle/Ebon Hold/Shadow Vault/etc.) so that all of the 80+'s would be separated away from the lower level people in the Old Kingdom/Kalimdor areas. That would greatly reduce the amount of high/low ganking.

Re:Old

[cecille]

movies are actually 24.

Re:Old

[AlamedaStone]

In WoW nobody cares if their character dies, because it has no consequence.

Unless it's on a group escort quest, or in a battleground. Or on an instance or raid boss..

Or if you die in an extremely amusing way, like walking out the drain pipe under Dalaran like I did once. I felt like Wile E Coyote.

Re:Old

[dingen]

Okay, so the chance of you being able to interact with someone else in WoW is 10K in 12M. That's roughly 0.08%.

Not a lot of social platforms are proud of this.

Re:Old

[dingen]

I agree things like quests and raids are games. But WoW is merely the platform hosting these games, it's not a game itself.

WoW is Facebook.

Re:Old

[Vohar]

The problem is that most innovations from Blizzard are geared towards getting more players to subscribe and keeping them subscribed in order to generate money, instead of greating an actual good and fun game.

Are there other games out there that benefit from the innovations created by Blizzard?

They've worked on cutting out the boring parts of MMOs (grinding mobs, long travel times, waiting on health/mana, spending an hour looking for a group) so that focus can be on actual play. How is that not focusing on fun?

What do other games' benefit have to do with this? Though to answer your question, yes--The "less downtime, more play time" model has been copied in pretty much every MMO since.

Re:Old

[NeutronCowboy]

Depends on your server. I run on an RP-PvP server, and there are several guilds who actually run large-scale RP-PvP events: i.e., a coordinated King of the Hill or such battle where Horde and Alliance guilds agree on a basic set of rules (kill these people in this time frame, hold that area at time x, etc). Events are generally open to any who wants to join, so it's pretty easy to get 40-50 people on each side. Great fun in general.

Furthermore, random PvP in the open can quickly trigger a large-scale battle when people call in reinforcements.

To me, that's the real fun of WoW. I hate the gear grind with a passion (the RNG is broken for me), and MoBs are too stupid to be a challenge. Well, that, and running old-world raids. Gives me a chance to experience some awesome content that a lot of people haven't seen in ages.

Re:Old

[Duradin]

"You can always try again, without being set back at all."

This is true only if you assign no value to your time.

Did someone stand in the fire, cause a wipe after repops, and force the entire raid to have to reclear the instance or call it a night and waste another night's learning attempt? I call that a setback. Of course, I value my time.

Re:Old

[dingen]

What do other games' benefit have to do with this?

Because that is how you recognize real innovation: if it's copied by others so that all games improve instead of just the one that came up with the innovation.

Re:Old

[AlamedaStone]

Just reroll like the rest of us. If your friend really likes hanging out with you, he'll level a character with you. That's what I did. Left a large raiding guild on one server to play with RL friends on another. One of them leveled with me, and it's now his favorite character.

Friends undertake endeavors together. Without RL friends playing WoW, I would have quit and never come back years ago.

Re:Old

[dingen]

So what do you do with 10 friends spread out over multiple servers?

And don't say "play EVE instead" :-P

Re:Old

[AlamedaStone]

It's not hard to avoid lag when all that's going on is moving little static ship models around. There isn't even physical terrain with obstacles and line-of-sight to check for.

I really can't believe EVE fans are even trying to make this comparison.

EVE players froth at the mouth and go into convulsions when anyone mentions WoW. I think it's because EVE largely serves, to use the vernacular, ethugs and not carebears.

In other words, they're mostly internet tough guys and the bright colors of WoW make them feel like less than men, I guess.

Re:Old

[AlamedaStone]

There's a lot more going on in WoW than in EVE, which is just static ship models drifting around. WoW is essentially a 3D action game with terrain and line-of-sight, and you have to deal with all the network traffic and server-side processing that entails.

I agree, and I enjoy it, but I really REALLY wish they'd implement true line of sight. Shooting through trees vexes me.

Re:Old

[Idiomatick]

Errr... from a server POV having characters that move their arms and make noise has NO effect.

EVE doesn't have terrain but wow doesn't have objects in any real sense. In eve bullets/lasers/missiles are actual objects that move and require impact detection. In wow, spells, arrows, w/e are all targeted to a person and they hit or miss, completely run client side. Terrain/obstacles in wow only effect spells half the time... generally you can shoot through most obstacles (this has been improving) but not through terrain. And I imagine you can fly near/through bigger ships. that requires impact detection going on.

Disclaimer: I haven't played eve nearly as much as wow.

Re:Old

[Cyrus20]

It's not about losing everything. Being able to die is not required to be qualified as a game in my book. But some form of failure is.

In WoW, you can never fail at anything. You can always try again, without being set back at all. In EVE at least people can steal your stuff when your ship is destroyed. This makes you want to prevent being destroyed. In WoW nobody cares if their character dies, because it has no consequence.

there are consequences just minor but it does set you back, also your line about not failing in wow because you can "try again" if you have to try again.. you failed the first time you tried.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

I did not hear a single negative comment from anyone yesterday.

Well... I ended up in Occulus *twice* last night.

Re:Old

[dingen]

there are consequences just minor but it does set you back, also your line about not failing in wow because you can "try again" if you have to try again.. you failed the first time you tried.

I'm not saying you can't fail at playing WoW. I'm saying failing has no real consequence, so it doesn't matter if you fail.

Re:Old

[boaworm]

If you want to have an argument against WoW being a game, then you should look more at the fact that there's not really an end goal in the game.

WoW is a bit like being alive. Life itself does have an "end", but it is not the goal of life to reach it. It's all about having fun while "living", not trying to finish it as soon as possible...

Re:Old

[SanityInAnarchy]

Blizzard doesn't care about what? Becoming what they already are?

I'm sorry, do they already support their entire player base in a single continuous world? Or are they still sharded to maybe a thousand players per "server"?

People love throwing around the "they don't care" rhetoric.

I never said they have to care, nor do I mean to imply they don't care about anything. In this context, all I mean to say is they don't care about this particular aspect of getting everyone into the same world, whereas Eve clearly does.

Again, they don't have to care -- especially given not all players even agree it's a good idea. I'm simply stating a fact here.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

> This game has turned from a MMORPG into a glorified dungeon crawling game.

And glorified it is. That's what people are paying a monthly fee for.

What I wonder is why they even bother with the stylized artistic graphics. Most of the hardcore WoW gamers seem to be perfectly happy playing a spreadsheet.
 

Re:Old

[WuphonsReach]

Eve *does* have instances--there are missions that DO instance you off from the rest of the player base.

No, EVE does not have instances. When you do a mission, even the tutorial missions, you're still in the same star system, it just picks a random point within your ship's range and tosses you there. You then get a magical "can't be scanned" bubble which prevents covert ops pilots from finding you with their scanning probes.

(That bubble vanishes after you end the mission. So if you're in lo-sec, always loot up before turning in the mission.)

Re:Old

[stonewallred]

Please don't roll a DK. Enough of the idiots roam the servers as it is. Roll a toon and have your friend power level it, by grouping and letting the higher level toon do the killing. You can take a toon from 1 to 50 in about four hours this way.

Re:Old

[SanityInAnarchy]

They've worked on cutting out the boring parts of MMOs (grinding mobs, long travel times, waiting on health/mana, spending an hour looking for a group) so that focus can be on actual play.

I play a 2D MMO -- it's been going for over ten years. The only one of those problems that exists for me is "grinding mobs". There's a huge amount of soloing possible, everything's in the same server so it's not usually difficult to find a group, there's teleportation, and if I can't find a player, there are still NPCs (or, hell, potions) I can use to restore full health/mana.

I doubt very much that WoW "innovated" these things.

Re:Old

[bdenton42]

Or if you die in an extremely amusing way, like walking out the drain pipe under Dalaran like I did once. I felt like Wile E Coyote.

I did that once. It's ashame I forgot that I was a Paladin and could have bubbled before impact.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, try learning how to make a coherent point. You say in one post Eve is trying to become WoW, but WoW isn't trying. Then you say it doesn't matter because it would be a bad idea anyway for WoW to be like Eve? Do you even know what you're trying to say?

Re:Old

[SanityInAnarchy]

Actually, I did try to imply procedural content and other similar methods with with "you can duplicate the same content with slight changes". Now in hindsight, "slight changes" may have been somewhat badly worde

That's an understatement.

All such attempts ends up with everything feeling generic and unsatisfying.

Go play with a fractal.

without a great amount of work by actual artists/designers, you simply don't get something worthwhile.

I agree. However, the point is to amplify and augment that work.

In particular, there's nothing stopping you from procedurally-generating a landscape (something it can be quite good at) and then placing manually-constructed things in the way. Space seems like the perfect place for this -- most of it's empty space, there's a few asteroids and planets and things (easy to generate), and then you manually add things like space stations and ships, allowing a fair amount of player customization -- but then again, it makes sense that things like ships and space stations would be manufactured, and thus, you'd have a lot of the same.

Re:Old

[Vohar]

It wasn't the industry standard until they did it. The standard pre-WoW included sitting for 5 minutes at a time to recover mana. Spending hours just getting from one place to another. 4-hour corpse runs. This was all the norm. Don't point to some obscure 2d game and tell me that -it- changed the genre.

Re:Old

[Opportunist]

In WoW, I'm sure it breaks down to zerging and numbers. It's the logical consequence of a game where equipment (and level, which is basically the same) is the be-all, end-all determining factor of success or failure. But ya know, there are games out there where being able to play your role in a massive battle well makes a lot of a difference.

Re:Old

[SanityInAnarchy]

Dude, try learning how to make a coherent point.

Ah, it looks as though my post wasn't worded clearly enough. Sorry.

You say in one post Eve is trying to become WoW, but WoW isn't trying.

Nope. Here's what I said:

I'm not saying they could become WoW overnight. I'm saying they're at least trying, whereas Blizzard doesn't seem to care.

What I mean here is, I'm not saying Eve could handle the WoW player base overnight -- but at least they are trying to scale within a single shard, whereas WoW isn't.

Then you say it doesn't matter because it would be a bad idea anyway for WoW to be like Eve?

Where did I say that? I can't find it at all.

Do you even know what you're trying to say?

Absolutely, but judging by my typo, I probably shouldn't be posting at that time of night.

Re:Old

[AutumnLeaf]

Actually, the opposite is true for me. Before the patch, I was faced with the following choice:

1) Go do dailies, quests, lore, explore, and as a result most likely do not run an instance because:
        * I'm no longer in a capital city so I won't see many of the group advertisements
        * The LFG tool rarely puts me in a group to the place I want to go
        * Even if I see a group for an instance I want to run, now that I spent time getting to where I am (and when doing loremaster, some places take 15 minutes to get to or more) I have to decide if it's worth the time penalty.

or

2) Stay in the capital city because that's the best way to find a group, because for some reason /2 is the default LFG channel, and while I sit here waiting... do nothing.

Now I can leave the capital cities and work on goals/quests out in "the world" while waiting for a group and when the group pops, I don't have to eat a 15-20 minute time penalty getting back to Silithus so I can keep grinding Cenarion Circle rep.

I expect to see MORE people out and about now. And if not - fine - less competition.

Re:Old

[stonewallred]

I play on a PVE server and make it a point to gank any lower level horde I run across that is flagged. If they want to set themselves open for it, who am I to deny them a GY run? Then again I spent 30 minutes with a 30th lvl horde hunter in a cave killing yetis. I as farming for leather and she was already in there questing/leveling. I let her attack first, then one shotted each yeti. She'd loot and I'd skin them. It is about cooperation sometimes and helping a nigga out.

Re:Old

[Americano]

In WoW, you can never fail at anything.

You have clearly never played WoW, if you can make that statement with a straight face.

Re:Old

[SanityInAnarchy]

It wasn't the industry standard until they did it.

So innovation only counts if you get the entire industry to adopt it?

I guess Microsoft "innovated" the GUI after all.

Don't point to some obscure 2d game and tell me that -it- changed the genre.

I never said that. All I'm saying is that it was clearly not a new idea, nor even the first implementation of it, so it's not something you can give Blizzard credit for "innovating".

But now that you mention it, I'd suggest looking at the role it had in the history of the genre before you write it off as "some obscure game":

Ultima Online, released in 1997, may be credited with first popularizing the genre, though Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds, released in 1996, was primarily responsible for mainstream attention in Asia, and EverQuest for the West.

Re:Old

[Loki_1929]

Chuck a zero on the end of that first number, and change the 3 to at least a 6, then you have WOW. (And that's underestimating their current subscribers.)

Eve would burn to the ground if even half that number tried to use it.

Actually, it depends on how spread out everyone gets. Eve has about 6,200 solar systems (not counting wormhole/unknown/uncharted systems), each of which can currently support about 1,500 players. That's a maximum theoretical limit of 9.3 million players. Of course, nobody would be able to move. Assuming 10% total system capacity, that's still 930,000 players. That can be done right now, with nearly no motivation for CCP to push it further due to current player distribution patterns.

Right now, Eve has large areas of essentially empty systems. You can sit there for days with nothing but a handfull of people passing through once in a while on their way to somewhere else. That's rather convenient when you want to be relatively left alone. Adding new systems would be incredibly easy since things like planets, moons, etc are all procedurally created. If it ever became an issue, they could simply buy up some more blade servers, connect them as nodes within Tranquility, and double, triple, or quadruple the total number of systems. The only crunch would be within empire, and that too could be readily expanded.

Eve scales exponentially within a single instance because the things they didn't do right from the start get re-written to be right later.

Re:Old

[H0p313ss]

I did not hear a single negative comment from anyone yesterday.

Well... I ended up in Occulus *twice* last night.

/hug

Re:Old

[Whorhay]

One characters actions, even emotive and purely cosmetic actions produce server load. Because the server has to forward a packet to each of the characters within range that the action happened. That said the inability of WoW to handle midsized crowds without lots of lag is a bit perplexing. I would guess that there is a lot more processing being done than we know about, whether or not that processing is necesary to the enjoyment of the game we can't really judge.

Re:Old

[BoberFett]

Are all 54K in the same star system at the same time participating in the same battle?

How many active players per star system does EVE support?

If not, then does it really matter if other users are on different WoW servers?

Re:Old

[Loki_1929]

You're right, there's hardly anything at all to check for in Eve. There's no such things as planets, astroids, moons, stations, starbases, NPC ships, containers, jetcans, other players' ships, deployable weapons, drones, stargates, etc moving in three dimensions with collision detection to worry about. Very easy to avoid lag when all you've got is hundreds of players firing weapons at each other that need to calculate for explosion radius, tracking speed, shifting distances, angular velocity, transversal velocity, flight times, etc.

It's not even like there's anything cool to look at while that stuff's happening...
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/51662/EVE-Online-Dominion-Screenshots-Trailer

Re:Old

[Knara]

EVE is not a casual game, that's for sure. They're quite happy not being a game that caters to everyone, at that.

Re:Old

[Knara]

I'm sure you know that the "static ship models" actually are animated, that line-of-sight needs to be calculated whenever there's natural or artificial structures in place, and that the relative positioning of PCs and NPCs have to be calculated, anyway, right?

Re:Old

[zippthorne]

TV is shot at 60 frames per second. Yeah, ok, they're "half-field" frames, but that's better anyway when fluid motion is more important than detail. Movies are the one that is shot at 24 fps, but they keep the shutter open longer, so you get motion blur. Graphics cards simulate motion blur by averaging a bunch of consecutive frames together. If you can't throw the frames out, you don't get the compensatory motion blur, if you can throw the frames out, why not display them directly up to the limit of the screen?

Re:Old

[praxis]

I'm at 1680x1050... yes, it's a lower resolution, but not as much lower as you might think.

I don't disagree with your point that looking at raw FPS rates to judge how you feel about a game is a bit silly since only the qualitative impression should matter, but you are a bit off on 1680x1050 not being much lower than 2560x1600. There are 232% more pixels in 2560x1600 than there are in 1680x1050 (4,096,000 vs. 1,764,000). That's a lot more pixels; the color of which must be determined.

Re:Old

[praxis]

I would have been surprised if you had heard a negative comment from participants in a *voluntary* activity. "I really hate putting this sharp bamboo splinter under my finger nails, but I'm going to keep doing it." If they found the new random dungeons to be totally soulless--or not their cup of tea for some other reason--they wouldn't be participating.

Re:Old

[praxis]

According to the current marketing material, 11 million people play WoW worldwide. Less than 350.000 play Eve. I guess we know which one gets old fast.

I would like to point out a flaw in your argument. The argument you make supports popularity, but not which one gets old fast. To measure which one gets old faster you would have to have retention data for those players that found each game to be to their liking to begin with (i.e. not those that tried a game and quit because they decided it wasn't for them from the get-go). I have yet to see that sort of data, so I can't make an argument one way or another, but I do know current subscriber numbers don't lead to such a conclusion either.

I do have anecdotal evidence based on my friends. All my friends have played both games at least once. Many didn't like EVE, it just wasn't for them. Many also didn't like WoW, it just wasn't for them. But, those that did like EVE in the beginning still have accounts (five years later). None of my friends play WoW anymore (most quite before BC when the MC/BWL/AQ raiding game got stale), they've moved on to Aion or something else. Of course, that's not a strong argument either, but at least it's along the right track (retention) rather than subscriber numbers (popularity).

Re:Old

[Xveers]

So you're walking around on a 2d plane shooting and doing effects without having a hitscan in the environment? Interesting.

While the ship models in EVE are static (though gun turrets aboard do rotate), the effects they have to generate are considerably more intensive. Just about any activity you do in your ship will have some external visible effect. Repairing armor or shields will result in a visual animation over your hull or shields. Each gun that fires means a single effect just for that. Any remote support, ditto. A logistics ship can be remotely repairing 4-5 ships at once, with a visible effect for each seperate repair signal.

http://www.youtube.com/user/CCPGAMES#p/c/10838E1219A2EC16/5/JNFh1rgJ958

That's a link to one of the tournament fights that CCP put on between player groups. The client HAS been modified, but only to show the health of 20 ships at a time, broken into teams, and to remove the commentator's own ship UI. Other than that, it's legit. That's a small 10v10 battle.

Re:Old

[cfalcon]

I seriously doubt that would have longevity, or be able to appeal to anyone outside of a hardcore subset of players.

Re:Old

[scot4875]

Eve has the advantage of being a space-based game. If they need more "room" for ships in a zone/quadrant/whatever (I don't play the game), they just make a zone that's 100,000x100,000 instead of 10,000x10,000 and insert some more stock items for asteroids and planets to populate the area. (I don't know how detailed their planets are, but would assume that they aren't modeled and interactive down to a person-scale or even a city-scale)

WoW is based on land. While it would be entirely possible to have procedurally-generated areas of land, it really *wouldn't* be possible to have procedurally-generated cities that weren't bland and uninteresting. I'll say WoW in general, and the capital cities in particular, are already crowded enough. If they were to consolidate every player into one server, Dalaran would be a sea of characters. It would be absolutely terrible. In Elwynn Forest, instead of a few dozen players screwing around in Goldshire, you'd have thousands or tens of thousands. For world bosses, you'd have, say, 40 people in a raid (or more likely, 25) to down them when they spawned on their 24 hour/7 day spawn timers. So for each timer, you'd have 25 out of 12,000,000 able to kill it for gear/achievements.

There's a reason that Blizzard "doesn't seem to care" about consolidating everyone onto a single server. It's because it's a terrible idea, and while it would be nice to be able to run instances with your cross-server friends, I definitely wouldn't the entire planet's WoW-playing population all in Dalaran complaining about the unplayable framerates and lag at once.

--Jeremy

Re:Old

[MORB]

It's not like every dungeon would have to be like this. A lot of wow players seem to have that annoying sense of entitlement that make them think they they have a right to demand that every bit of the content in the game to be tailored towards their own specific taste.
Please note that all I'd like is for world pvp to still exist. There was a time where it existed along with instances but now it has been completely torn apart mostly to provide a little additional convenience to people who like nothing but run instances all day long in the form of a little less downtime.

Hilariously enough, they now have server capacity problems because too many people are trying to launch instances. People always come up with that strawman argument against open world content that the servers can't handle hundred of players at the same place like it necessarily have to involve that many players, but you know what? Instances aren't cheap either because you need to handle lots of mobs and their associated AI scripts for the benefit of only 5 players.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

In wow, spells, arrows, w/e are all targeted to a person and they hit or miss, completely run client side.

There's no polite way to say this, but, you're absolutely wrong, and you have no clue what you're talking about. If what you claim were true, everyone would be running hacked clients that never, ever missed.

There is no apples-to-apples comparison between what EVE and WoW servers are required to do. The game systems are completely different. EVE may have more bullets, sure. WoW has lots of area-of-effect abilities. Each character has, potentially, dozens of buffs and debuffs. They have their gear, and all enchants/buffs to their gear. Actions in WoW typically happen every 1.5 seconds, and each action can trigger a number of random effects. The arrow/spell you see flying towards another character is probably the simplest part of what the server has to keep track of. WoW also keeps track of an absurd number of, frankly, irrelevant statistics, but those all still have to be stored in a database.

So, the fact that you believe either game's server responsibilities to be easy is probably because you have a gross misunderstanding (or underestimation) of what they actually do.

--Jeremy

Re:Old

[scot4875]

I agree, and I enjoy it, but I really REALLY wish they'd implement true line of sight. Shooting through trees vexes me.

This doesn't bother me nearly as much as watching arrows magically track their targets.

--Jeremy

Re:Old

[thoth]

It means that some interesting gameplay aspects that can normally be found in MMORPGs (such as open world pvp)

I think open world pvp is the great myth of the genre - so many people claim they want it, yet subscription numbers and $$$ say otherwise.

I VASTLY prefer the battleground system for pvp. At least that way you get level throttled and relatively balanced numbers on opposing teams. Open world pvp was 95% ganking by either more numbers, or higher levels.

Re:Old

[Rakarra]

WoW is not a game because it lacks a basic aspect of a game: you can't lose.

That's a pretty artificial/arbitrary definition of a game.

Re:Old

[Knara]

They had that sort of arrangement in Dark Age of Camelot, as well. For my money, no one has done realm vs realm as well as Mythic did in that game.

Sadly, they were unable to repeat the success with Warhammer, for a variety of reasons.

Re:Old

[ZerothAngel]

The deadspace scan-dampening effect was actually removed in Apocrypha (the expansion that brought in the new scanning mechanic). Mission runners are just as easy to scan out as someone sitting uncloaked at a "safe" spot.

One only has to run a mission in Dodixie to find out how... :)

Re:Old

[SpaceCadets]

From my experiance, you get much less XP by grouping with a higher level at a low level, and while I'm here I'l gonna call BS on leveling a toon to 50 in four hours. No way. But hey, if I'm wrong, I will subscribe to your newsletter. ;)

Re:Old

[Rakarra]

Some of the lag is server side, but much of it is actually client-side as well, trying to maintain all the textures of each person who is in range, with each person wearing different armor pieces.

Some people get confused talking about server-side lag, where instant-cast abilities take seconds to fire, and client-side frame rates, where things slow down enough to look like a slide-show.

Re:Old

[SpaceCadets]

The way I look at WoW is that it's my social life. For a 21yo I don't go out, I hate shopping, therefore I feel I can spend money on this game to make it more enjoyable. So when I found out the CAD have a guild on Sentinals, you know what I did? Spent some of my real life money, and moved servers. What's the big deal? It doesn't cost that much to change server, I ended up moving all my mains because I was over Aman'Thul so much. So really, get over it, cause there are ways to play with your mates.

Re:Old

[Rakarra]

It's not just FPS though, processor and video card also affect how fast models load in, especially noticable in a crowded city like Dalaran.

Something funny happened with the Icecrown patch -- during the first boss in the 25-man, my FPS dropped to about 5-6, while it's normally around 30+, even in raids.

Re:Old

[Anonymous Coward]

The one on the inner-most planet?

Re:Old

[Rakarra]

I've found that resolution doesn't actually have that big an impact on frame rates. When the game lags to, oh, 6 fps for me, switching from 2560x1600 to 1280x800 doesn't really seem to make any difference.

Re:Old

[Supurcell]

One time the Alliance attacked the zeppelin between Orgrimmar and the Undercity. It was one of the funnest moments of that game. Every time the zeppelin would travel between the two zones, everyone who had died was restored to full health. I was a priest, so my job was to cast my fear bomb and try to mind control jump people off the blimp(preferably into deep water), because that was the only way to get rid of them. It was a constant, vicious melee.

This was all pre-burning crusade. If only there was a way to go back to the old days. Too bad my old crew had so much drama that they had to all transfer to different servers.

Re:Old

[Cal27]

Last time I checked (which was about a year and a half ago), you could have characters on as many servers as you want, until you hit the 50 character limit. I don't think they would change this as it would create lots of problems if you already had characters on more than ten servers, so I'll assume they didn't.

Re:Old

[H0p313ss]

I would have been surprised if you had heard a negative comment from participants in a *voluntary* activity.

You have clearly never played WoW. People with no clue about software design are CONSTANTLY bitching about Blizzard. The point was despite the disparaging remarks above the normally intolerant players were actually enjoying the new system. Believe me, when it breaks people complain.

Re:Old

[ajs]

Actually what they did in WoW is rather awful.

See, people aren't really sharing a single universe. They just do instanced content together. instanced content means that your party gets its own private copy of a level and do some dungeon crawling in there.

Meanwhile in other news, trade channel is full of "LFG premade for random heroic" and still everyone on the server interacts with each other over trade skills, questing, etc, etc.

The sky is not, nor has it ever been falling.

Re:Old

[ajs]

"The fact is that most people don't actually want to play a "massively" multiplayer online role-playing game. They (and I) want to play a multi-player online game."
Then why not play such a game in the first place instead of playing a different type of game and waiting until its publisher ends up into turning it into the kind of game you want?

But WoW has always been both. I know players who have barely ever seen the outside world. They've been summoned to every instance, done no questing except required class quests, and never leave major cities.

I know other players who almost never step into an instance and do all of their game-playing out in the world, exploring, farming, questing and generally appreciating the scope of the world.

It takes all kinds, and if WoW lost either of those types of players (among many others) it would be the less for it.

Re:Old

[Idiomatick]

You don't shoot a fireball with a vector... You shoot it at a target. Pretty sure you've no idea what you are talking about. AOE's are pretty simple since they (rarely) have a time based aspect, you just hit everything in range when you release the spell. And all of a character's gear/stats/w/e are stored in ram and only loaded when the character enters the screen, this isn't all needed immediately either... Stats or actions can be loaded after gear loads which comes after position. Anyways, you don't know what you are talking about (I've taken part in a few oss mmos so i've done some of the coding for this stuff)

Re:Old

[ajs]

And yet you can only communicate with how many other players on WoW? 1000 or something?

You can communicate with all of them (everyone gets a forum account). What you can't do is walk up to their character and wave. For that, you have a few tens of thousands of other players to choose from (it's not thousands... if it were, there would have to be thousands of realms to make up the 11 or so million users that make up the WoW community last I checked the official stats, which don't include trial accounts or inactive accounts).

At least on EVE you can interact with every other EVE player. I really feel this is a huge advantage. I know several people who play WoW and I would like to join them, but since they're all on different servers, I will have to choose one of my friends to play with and ignore the others.

Or, if they want to all play together, they can pay a small fee to have their characters transferred to one server, but I agree. The inability to play with your friends is WoW's Achilles' heal. To solve that they need to introduce better ways to group with mixed-level friends in a way that rewards everyone and to allow people to migrate more freely between servers. I'm hopeful that the noises they've made about Cataclysm point to at least the first part of that being addressed, and they have reduced the time between server moves, but it's still not where I think it needs to be.

Re:Old

[Idiomatick]

If the whole server rack goes down and everyone in a continent DCs I'm pretty confident that counts as server side :P

Re:Old

[ajs]

EVE can handle over one thousand players in a single system/"zone". Places like Jita (THE trade hub of EVE) regularily pass 1300 concurrent active users at one time. In one star system. Admittedly though the vast majority of Jita players are "passing through" or conducting trade and not shooting each other in the face. Star systems out in the areas of space where players create their own empires can have fleet battles that push past 400 people per side, though admittedly there are occurences of heavy lag.

That's impressive.

WoW has serious latency problems when numbers get past about 2-400 in a single place (Lake Wintergrasp battles come to mind).

But of course, the two games are modeling totally different things. In the end, they're both fun for different reasons. I'd love to see a WoW-like game that has a single "realm" or "server" but there are serious technical limitations that prevent it right now, and some very creative work will be required to get from here to there. Until then, I appreciate both types of games.

Re:Old

[SanityInAnarchy]

If they need more "room" for ships in a zone/quadrant/whatever (I don't play the game), they just make a zone that's 100,000x100,000 instead of 10,000x10,000 and insert some more stock items for asteroids and planets to populate the area.

I don't play either, but I have a feeling that would get boring fast, if that was all. However, you are right that they could probably add a few asteroids and planets.

However, you seem to be implying that Eve has less need for artwork, and I'm not convinced of that.

While it would be entirely possible to have procedurally-generated areas of land, it really *wouldn't* be possible to have procedurally-generated cities that weren't bland and uninteresting.

And you base this on...?

I would argue that it would be quite possible, though as you imply, there would still need to be a fair amount done by hand.

If they were to consolidate every player into one server, Dalaran would be a sea of characters.

They'd have to create more space, and they'd have a bit more civil engineering to do, yes.

For world bosses,

So you add more world bosses, even duplicates of the current ones.

There's a reason that Blizzard "doesn't seem to care" about consolidating everyone onto a single server. It's because it's a terrible idea,

"It's hard" doesn't make it a terrible idea. It may make it an unsound business plan, however.

Nor would it necessarily have to be a single server, all at once. But it really does seem like the WoW approach to this problem has generally been still more sharding and instancing, making it less "massive" of a game.

Re:Old

[Cal27]

I don't think WoW would have any problem supporting every player on the same 'realm', but the client might have some problems. From my experience, most of the players are concentrated in the major cities (Orgrimmar, Undercity, Stormwind, Ironforge, Shattrath, and Dalaran). I play[ed] on a low-population realm, so other servers might be completely different. I guess it doesn't really matter for the sake of the argument. Anyway, even with the low population on my realm, the major cities consistently killed my FPS; I could not imagine having every bored player in the entire game hanging out in Shattrath. Plus, the chat channels would be even more clogged. On my server, there's always off-topic chat going on in trade (and that's about the only thing really), with every player it would be impossible to read anything before it gets scrolled away.
WoW just isn't designed for large amounts of players in the same place. It would require a complete overhaul to both the server and client sides to keep the game even remotely playable with the huge amounts of players that this would entail. It's just not feasible.

Re:Old

[Satanboy]

this is not the case, the consequence is time and inconvenience

Re:Old

[bckrispi]

WoW not having a lose condition is not the only reason why it isn't a proper game.

Stupid much?

You get together with 24 of your buddies for Trial of the Crusader. You spend 90 minutes getting through the first four bosses. You then fight Anub'arak. You wipe. You then fight him again. You wipe. Repeat this five or six times. Finally, you get him down to 10% of his health, and you still have 23 party members alive. Victory is within your grasp. Then his enrage timer goes off because you weren't fast enough in beating him down. You wipe. Discouraged and despondent, your group breaks up for the day. If this wasn't bad enough, you still have a 150g repair bill waiting for you when you get back to town.

So maybe by your definition, it ain't "losing". But it sure as hell feels like it!!

Re:Old

[bckrispi]

This makes you want to prevent being destroyed. In WoW nobody cares if their character dies, because it has no consequence.

Wow.. And to think all this time I thought "You have died. Your equipment suffers 10% damage." was a consequence. With all the bitching about repair bills, it sure feels like one.

Re:Old

[bckrispi]

Are there other games out there that benefit from the innovations created by Blizzard?

Ever play an RTS? Blizzard damn near invented the genre.

Re:Old

[bckrispi]

Imagine Facebook would work like that. "Hey, I'm on Facebook, you too?" "Yeah man, add me as your friend! Oh wait, you're on a different Facebook server... never mind." You think that's acceptable too?

Aren't you the same guy a few posts up who kept complaining that "WoW isn't a game. It's Facebook."? You like to bitch. We get that. At least be consistent about it.

Re:Old

[dingen]

WoW is like Facebook, except for the fact that it fails at it.

That's what I'm saying the entire time.

Re:Old

[GundamFan]

That's fine by me. Tried it, didn't like it after a while, quit. I don't want to change them, I'll just find a new game to play. I love the concept of EVE but in practice it's easy to be overwhelmed by the shear size and depth of the sandbox and the seemingly titanic time investment required for any kind of fulfilling game play. I don't want to change myself to play the game and I wouldn't change the game to suit my needs.

Fuckin nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

Suck my mana potion, bitch.

Not quite working ... Yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

they don't quite work yet. you can start a group with others in your battle group, even chat in party or raid with them, like in battle grounds. but when its time to port/enter an instance...
delay.. screenshot of the instance.. then dropped back to where you were..

good idea, but need to work out the bugs.

Kramark- Crushridge.
FTH

Re:Not quite working ... Yet...

[__aatgod8309]

It's WoW; you come for the good ideas, and stay for the bugs.

(Mostly because you're unable to logout)

And lots of bugs

[DurendalMac]

Yep, and it also brings a shitload of bugs that they KNEW about on the PTR. They went live with the patch anyway. The new graphical backends are causing issues left and right. I can say that in OS X, my framerates have plummeted (and I'm on a 3.8ghz i7 Hackintosh with a GTX 285), VSync no longer works at all, and the command key does not work in game. This stuff was well known on the PTR and they went live with it anyway. It's fucking unbelievable.

Re:And lots of bugs

[Corbets]

Hackintosh? Is that a Blizzard-supported hardware-OS combination?

Re:And lots of bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

Hackintosh isn't a supported platform.

I am running Wow on Mac Mini and I have no issues at all with it. The only laggy place is Dalaran, because it is a central hub for players to meet up. Wearing Gnomish X-Ray specs at high population times stops that lag.

In the lifetime of playing Wow (little over a year) it has crashed 3 times for me.

Re:And lots of bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me DurendalMac, why Blizzard should feel inclined to fix your problems only occurring when running a completely unsupported, and depending on who you ask, also illegal installation? Tell me, did you purchase OS X? Didn't think so, but I bet you feel entitled to it anyway because "Apple won't sell me what I want".

What's "It's fucking unbelievable" is that there actually are so self-centered people like yourself who can't see the irony in what you are writing.

Re:And lots of bugs

[pHus10n]

I'm on a late-2008 24" iMac, 3.06Ghz / 512 Geforce 8800. My computer lags so bad in Dalaran after the 3.3 patch, I feel like a kernal panic is due any moment. One of the *first* things I noticed from the graphical changes they talked about was this weird fog in the Stormwind background behind my human paladin on the character select screen. Something drastic was changed, and not necessarily for the better.

Re:And lots of bugs

[MBGMorden]

Probably not, but with all the work the community has done, Hackintosh's on solid hardware are typically pretty problem free machines (and no, that's not being sarcastic). Generally if a program runs bad on a Hacktinosh that is otherwise behaving then it's because the program itself is buggy, not the machine.

As someone who actually owns a real Macbook and a G4 Mac but has a hacktinosh to play games because the specs on the other two systems just aren't geared for it, I can honestly say that aside from the Hackintosh showing an AMI BIOS screen at boot followed by a brief Chameleon loader splash you'd literally never know the difference between it and a "real" Mac.

Re:And lots of bugs

[Tetrarchy]

They went live with it because people were so fricking bored with the current content that i suspect they were losing subscribers. I know our guild lost a few. That being said I haven't much noticed any performance decreases or unusual issues more than any other patch day 1

Re:And lots of bugs

[DurendalMac]

Because this has NOTHING to do with Hackintoshes, you idiot. It's happening to Mac users en masse.

Wow marketing scheme

[Tibia1]

Developer: 'So I was sayin' we could have cross server gameplay if we just made some instance servers-'
CFO: 'Hmm, what about the proposal John made about making them pay 20 bucks for a server transfer-(bursts into laughter)'
Developer: 'Alright sir, we'll make them think its acceptable after a year of profits and then offer the cross server gameplay servers.'
CFO: 'You see what we have over here folks? A real blizzard employee!'

They're making the game far too easy

[iamapizza]

I really like the cross-server instances feature, it's going to cut down my dungeon wait times from 8 hours to a few minutes, but looking at a few other points on the patch notes, it's like they're just making the game easier and easier.

• Knockbacks no longer dismount players
• To use any Meeting Stone, it is only required that the character's minimum level be 15. There is no maximum character level requirement for any Meeting Stone.
• Creatures attacking a player from behind can no longer cause players level 1-5 to be dazed, and have a reduced chance to cause players level 6-10 to be dazed
• These regeneration rates have been increased by up to 200% for low level characters.
• More mana regen, lower mana requirements
• Any party member may mark targets
• Etc etc

So their aim seems to be to get players to level up faster... but I feel that's taking away some of the fun of the game.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[RogueyWon]

You have a point, but I think there's a little more to it than this. I suspect that they're speeding up the levelling process because they're going to add another five levels onto the top come the next expansion. My impression has always been that Blizzard have a definitive idea how long it should take a player to go from level 1 to the maximum level, and that they try to keep this constant through expansions. So, not long after the release of Burning Crusade, we had a nerf to the 1-60 levelling process (with 60-70 still being a substantial gap). Then 60-70 was nerfed shortly before Lich King hit. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the 70-80 xp grind had a nerf shortly before or after 4.0.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Derosian]

I'm sorry but after getting 3 characters to 80, leveling just is not fun anymore... I feel most of the fun is at max level now.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[imamac]

Whereas for me the leveling is incredibly fun. But I just started playing 3 months ago and have one level 43 character, one in the mid-20s and half a dozen others in the teens. I imagine they are /trying/ to strike a balance between people like you and people like me.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Kjella]

They don't want to have a very long experience gap between new players and "regular" players. You get to grind your way up to 90, getting up to 80 gets easier. That's the way it's always been, so everybody can complain about how "easy" it's become but really they're just trying to keep people together. It's not "fair" but it's a game, if the endgame was a target that kept moving further and further away for new players it'd eventually become some place they'd never reach.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Fross]

Any changes to levels below 10 are inconsequential, that's about 3 hours of playtime. Removing the dazing effect and increasing regeneration just helps out new players, and i presume Blizzard is trying to recruit new players/subscriptions rather than just alts.

The meeting stone level requirement is effectively a nod toward boosting - given that low levels go past so quickly now, it's actually quite difficult to find a proper party for a mid level dungeon like maraudon, uldaman or that sort of thing. I guess Blizzard think it better that a new player get boosted through there, rather than miss it altogether.

Damn, I miss when you could get a full party for Scarlet monastery, though. Everything goes fine for the first 2 wings, then the leader switches on master looter for the tabard and hearths out - everyone else ragequits or goes to stormwind and badmouths him. Okay maybe I don't miss that so much.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Genocaust]

I've actually got 4 characters at 80, another at 73, and the next runner up at about 66. Leveling is what I enjoy.

The end game gear grind, however, is not fun. Don't get me wrong -- I love to experience new content, I don't, however, like to keep re-experiencing it at the mercy of the RNG hoping I get the item(s) I need. Yes, badges mitigate this, slightly, but in the end you're still grinding the same one or two instances until a new one gets released.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't really see much connection between the changes you posted and "making the game easier".

- the knockback change is primarily because knockbacks are ridiculously powerful already. This has nothing to do with "making the game easier", it's about balance
- The meeting stone change is one that should have been made years ago. The "easier" here is "not making 5 people spend an extra 10 minutes traveling somewhere that if they were just a LOWER level they would be able to do instantly
- The mana regen/daze/etc are all for characters below level 20. Out of 80 (soon to be 85) total levels. That's called "giving people a chance to learn the game"
- Any party memeber may mark targets makes the game easier? What the fuck are you smoking? How does that even relate in the slightest? That's simply a new tweak in mechanics that, while admittedly is a bad thing for other reasons, has nothing to do with making the game easier.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Anonymous Coward]

And to continue, your main point is right, you just have no clue what you're talking about. The "making the game too easy" changes have already happened over the course of the last two years.

Didn't you notice about a year ago when virtually every elite mob in the game (outside of instances) was changed to non-elite?

Didn't you notice when they added about 10 new spirit rezzers to make corpse runs shorter?

Didn't you notice the experience gain/level requirement changes with BC/Wrath that makes it take about 45 minutes/level from 20 to 60, and about 2 hours from 60-70?

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Sage Gaspar]

So the fun of the game is having to run across the world when you're too high level, stocking up on drinks and waiting for mana to regen, stupid clerical crap like tossing around who's leader so they can mark stuff?

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Fozzyuw]

it's like they're just making the game easier and easier.

If by easy, you mean faster to level, is there something wrong with that? Now, if only the instance server will stop crashing on the last boss of the Heroic dungeon. lol 3 times I failed to get the heroic daily bonus because of the server crash (I gave up trying) and once I got locked out of a decent Halls of Reflection heroic because the server crashed. lol, I only laugh at the irony of when it crashs. It seems to know when I will succeed and stay stable every other time. =P It's just growing pains, I know.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[fascam]

Making it easier? yes. Far too easy? I don't think so. Faster leveling will be nice for those just entering the game or alt-o-holics(I myself got cured of that some time ago). Hitting 80 isn't the end of the grind if you want to raid. In fact it's harder the longer the you go cause people expect you to have a level of gear before they bring you along. Getting that takes time so the quicker the xp grind the better. I love the cross server instances. I play a tank and a healer so finding a group has never been a problem for me but when I do want to just dps I wont be waiting forever...just a little longer than I normally would. The other great thing about the cross server instances is that people can do dungeons while leveling again. No one runs the old instances anymore. Such a shame. 1. They're fun 2. If you get a good group and can move fast they’re a fast XP. 3. Most important...they're training. You level a tank or healer and do dungeons while leveling by the time you get to 80 you have a pretty good idea of what you're doing. You won’t know it all but you'll know there’s more to being a tank than doing a respec, wearing a mix a blu dps gear and green (of defense) items, and stating "here I am" Has raiding been mad easier? You bet. Back in the day I was in a guild and had quite a few server first kills. It was great and lots of fun. But I dont have that time anymore and if I were a developer I would hate to invest a lot of time creating something that only 5% of the population will see. Those that still do want that game have their hard modes and are rewarded for it. At the end of the day it's a game. You play a game to have fun and be challenged. If WoW is no longer providing that for you then (and I don't mean this to be rude in any way) perhaps you need to find something new. It's your money and you should spend it on something you truly enjoy.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Sobrique]

Or y'know, you could just have a game that doesn't have such a gap - you can keep people 'together' by making it easy to catch up, or you can keep people together by making everyone have 'value' in their own right. When a level 1 can take the field, and ... if not win going toe to toe, at least be contributing to the oucome of the fight ... against a level 80, then you don't need to 'help them catch up'.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[PFactor]

"but I feel that's taking away some of the fun of the game." For whom?

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope your not saying its not fun because there isn't as mush of a grind anymore, because if that's the case you might have a mental illness.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[ProppaT]

Making it too easy? It was too easy from day one and they haven't made any strides to really up the difficulty. To WoW developers, adding grind is upping the difficulty...you know, instead of doing something like add strategy to a game that's designed around a bunch of people in a group all hitting their attack button at the same time. That kinda worked with Diablo (and was part of what made it great to some extent), but this is a different beast entirely. In fact, I'd blame the watering down of the entire genre on WoW. The last time I decided to take SoE up on a free month of EverQuest to check up on my old characters, I was kinda disgusted at how much they've tried to dumb down the game to try and draw over people who've gotten bored with WoW.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Idiomatick]

"it's actually quite difficult to find a proper party for a mid level dungeon like maraudon, uldaman or that sort of thing."

But the title of this article solves that problem....

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[bdenton42]

the knockback change is primarily because knockbacks are ridiculously powerful already. This has nothing to do with "making the game easier", it's about balance

The knockback change is about griefing. Mages were using it (via Fire Blast) to knock people off their mounts while flying causing them to die by falling. That incurs the equipment damage penalty which is why they nerfed it.

It would have been nicer if they could just not do the equipment damage penalty if you die as a result of falling during PvP but I imagine that fix would be harder to make, and they almost always do the easy fix.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Vohar]

This is one of the many, many posts from people who can't separate difficulty from tedium. Nothing in this post has anything to do with difficulty. Or leveling, for that matter. It's all about taking out the boring elements like sitting around waiting on mana before you're high enough in level to have abilities to manage it. Plus, it's only for levels 10 and below. That's only the first day or two of play.

And marking targets? Seriously? You're complaining about that as a means of leveling players faster? That's a matter of convenience for groups, and really doesn't change gameplay at all.

People often whine about getting rid of downtime and cutting down on travel times as "dumbing down" the game or making it "easier" but really it's just cutting out the boring parts so we can focus on the fun parts.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[prattle]

One of the main things which excites me about this dungeon finder is that it'll make finding groups for lower lvl instances much easier 'cause you'll be drawing from a large pool.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[bonch]

Knockbacks no longer dismount players

Knockbacks no longer dismount players so that fucking druids can't turn into a Moonkin, dismount you, and then fly away while you plummet to your death.

To use any Meeting Stone, it is only required that the character's minimum level be 15. There is no maximum character level requirement for any Meeting Stone.

Uh, so? Now a high-level player doesn't have to ride over to the classic instance anymore.

Creatures attacking a player from behind can no longer cause players level 1-5 to be dazed, and have a reduced chance to cause players level 6-10 to be dazed

It's only the first 10 levels. What does it matter?

These regeneration rates have been increased by up to 200% for low level characters.

Again, so what? They're helping classes that are hard to start with, such as priests who run out of mana but have no built-in way to regenerate it like mages and warlocks do.

Any party member may mark targets

How is this a problem in any way?

So their aim seems to be to get players to level up faster... but I feel that's taking away some of the fun of the game.

Let me get this straight. You don't get dazed as much and your mana regens faster before level 10, and that's taking away the fun of the game for the rest of the 70 levels you play through? Get real. You're nitpicking just to have something to complain about.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[pwfffff]

"Didn't you notice when they added about 10 new spirit rezzers to make corpse runs shorter?"

Yeah, MY idea of a fun time is holding W while my ghost runs across three zone... cry more.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Skuld-Chan]

The end game gear grind, however, is not fun. Don't get me wrong -- I love to experience new content, I don't, however, like to keep re-experiencing it at the mercy of the RNG hoping I get the item(s) I need. Yes, badges mitigate this, slightly, but in the end you're still grinding the same one or two instances until a new one gets released.

What do you mean slightly? You can purchase tier 9 items for every slot of your character with badges.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[eudaemon]

Only if you define "fun" as grinding through levels 1-80, and if that's the case you can always
do it again with another character. I did it exactly once as a shadow/holy priest and that was enough.
Should you just click to get premades ala the test realm and have a 80'th level character with no effort?
No, but the 55->80 thing for Death Knights Blizzard did to shortcut leveling made perfect sense. They need
to make that an option for any character class after you've leveled once to 80 the "hard way" in my opinion.

I don't define 1-80 as fun. What's fun for me in WoW is the going after and completing hard content -
hard modes in Ulduar, 3 drakes up in Obsidian Sanctum and of course PVP. Let's face it people will
always outclass the AI which seems to be the big selling point in EVE. It is possible to fail in WoW.
I have been in guilds that struggled to complete Naxx, so WoW exposes the best of people when your guild
or battleground group makes the goal, and the worst in people when they fail to not stand in the fire
or defend the flag. The folks who came late to World of Warcraft have it easier, but so what? Do they
really need to spend all the time early players did grinding to 60? Not really when the emphasis is on
"end game" content anyway. It's great to be nostalgic for the days before Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King,
but there's no compelling reason for it take bloody forever to make 80 any more - the challenge has moved
to elsewhere, and that's fine.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the difference between wanting to belong to a progression guild or not. Progressing through ToGC or now ICC is what I consider fun. Sure, gear helps make that possible but at the end of the day whether or not I get gear from loot council or spend my dkp points doesn't matter nearly as much to me as hanging out with friends and getting closer to a perfect run.

The great thing about WoW, and what has made Blizz sooooo much money, is they understand everyone wants something different. Some ppl really enjoy PvP, some enjoy questing, and some enjoy end-game raiding. (Then there are the trade chat trolls that seem to do nothing but hang out in Iroforge and make my ignore list...)

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Opportunist]

Damn, I miss when you could get a full party for Scarlet monastery, though. Everything goes fine for the first 2 wings, then the leader switches on master looter for the tabard and hearths out - everyone else ragequits or goes to stormwind and badmouths him. Okay maybe I don't miss that so much.

I'd guess you'll see more of that, now that badmouthing doesn't really work anymore with people being unable to really gauge who they're playing with in a PUG.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[MBGMorden]

I have to agree sadly. Functional things that make organizing things easier - like cross-realm dungeons for example, are always welcomed changes. However, it seems like Blizzard is constantly dumbing things down over time. Heck IIRC in Cataclysm they're not even going to have any stats aside from your basic STR/SPI/INT/STA on items, which is meant to "Reduce confusion".

Between the dumbing down of the instances, dumbing down of itemization, CONSTANT gear resets via moving badges so that everyone running dirt easy heroic content can always have gear on equal footing as everyone else, it's just gotten insane.

And mind you, I'm not being a complete elitist on the "easy badge gear" issue. Yes, I do think that people running harder content should have better gear, but it also works in reverse. I really haven't touched the game much in the last 3-4 months (mostly for the reasons cited above), so all my gear is typically stuff from Naxx25/Maly25/Sarth25 with a smattering of some Ulduar25 gear. Good stuff, but not the current top notch. Result of all this easy badge gear though is that any group expects EVERYONE to be sporting Tier9 equivalent gear for just about anything. You have people literally wanting 2800+ "gearscores" to run into a Naxx10 run.

Overall, the whole thing has just gotten to the point where I don't care to play anymore. Raiding has gotten boring - I want to raid for a challenge not a weekly "grab my epics and leave" session. Running heroics truly has turned into a treadmill - rather than running instances for strategic upgrades we're stuck running the same stuff over and over as they nudge the badge rewards up just a lil higher again.

IMHO things like achievements and such were a good idea - something to give everyone things to work towards. I log into WoW now though and it feels more like I'm in a themepark called WoWLand than the game I used to play. It's like an amusement park meant to be just an imitation of Azeroth - let people hang out, get fake toys, and experience "attractions" in the form of instances rather than an actual challenge.

Oh well. At least Dragon Age was fun to play through (and actually challenging). Here's hoping Bioware will continue to deliver and not fall into the same pit as Blizzard.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Opportunist]

Could someone hand that guy an "insightful" mod? He hit the nail so directly that the head is now no longer visible anymore.

WoW basically "ruined" the MMO world for those of us who wanted an MMO where a success actually meant something. At least more than "you managed to sit down for 5 hours and hit the same buttons over and over, good job!". There is rarely a challinging moment in WoW. Put time in, get reward out. If you're not good at it, all that means is that more time is required and maybe a different approach (e.g. instead of doing the raid you can't get a group for, farm some tokens and buy the gear with them instead).

And since it's the most successful of all MMOs (at least counting subscriber numbers), it's the role model for MMOs now. Everyone creates basically a copycat version of WoW. Invariably you have easy leveling with a very limited amount of player decision influencing it (try comparing it to the skill decision and implant/outfit system of Anarchy Online to see what I mean), solo playing 'til the end and no penalties for fucking up. And while this surely makes playing a lot more accessable and easier, it makes me wonder... why should I play if I know I already won?

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[MBGMorden]

Except that in the cross-realm instance runs master looting isn't an option - it's forced group loot with additional restrictions. Characters can't roll need on an item they can't equip, or on non-primary armor types. IE, Pallys/Warriors/DK's can only need roll on plate, Shammies/Hunters on Mail, Druids/Rogues on Leather, and Mages/Priests/Locks naturally only on cloth (all they can equip anyways). There's also some itemization requirements too. IE, warriors can't need roll on a sword with spellpower on it.

Overall they way they worked the loot system in the cross realm stuff it's gonna be pretty hard to ninja loot anything.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[WuphonsReach]

I'd guess you'll see more of that, now that badmouthing doesn't really work anymore with people being unable to really gauge who they're playing with in a PUG.

Blizzard's been running down that road of enabling cheaters / scammers to get away without reputation damage for quite a while now.

If you're mean towards other players you can now:

- Switch servers every 3 days (instead of 30 or 90 days)
- Switch factions every 3 days
- Change your name & character gender frequently (3 day timer)
- Use the cross-server PuGs to ninja everything without consequences

Basically, if you're a rich prick that can pay for changing servers, factions, names, it's a golden time to be playing WoW. You can scam, cheat, steal, ninja-loot to your heart's content and simply move from server to server after getting caught.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[AlamedaStone]

Any changes to levels below 10 are inconsequential, that's about 3 hours of playtime.

0-10 is about 20 minutes of gameplay, my good man. At least, that's true of the BC starting areas, and it will be true of all (4) of the rest in Cataclysm.

Zoom!

These changes don't make much of a difference to experienced players, they are simply to grade the curve for new players. Love it or hate it, this is the direction Blizzard chose long ago, so none of it should be much of a surprise.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[WuphonsReach]

I log into WoW now though and it feels more like I'm in a themepark called WoWLand than the game I used to play. It's like an amusement park meant to be just an imitation of Azeroth - let people hang out, get fake toys, and experience "attractions" in the form of instances rather than an actual challenge.

That analogy is completely on the mark.

They're trying to cater more and more towards the ADHD kids, who will immediately jump ship to the next shiny game that comes along, rather then take care of their core base of players who will stick around through thick and thin.

I swear that all of the "A" talent left the development team right after WotLK was released, and maybe even a month before. The entire WotLK experience has been one of adding "ooh shiny" bolt-ons rather then working within the original concept. I'm waiting for them to add mechwarrior vehicles that can morph from planes to boats to cars to walkers. Huge changes in difficulty of content. Instead of making a balanced change that is subtle and addresses the root cause, they simply nerf the content and slap a fresh coat of paint on it.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[furby076]

Once you get to level 80 they should allow you to create alt characters who start at level 50 or 60...similar to death knight. Give the player the option to also create a character from level 1. There are advantages for both options. It is not game breaking, and helps blizzard move away from the image that they try and make the game time consuming for players so players play longer.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[skeeto]

I wouldn't worry about making anything under level 15 easier. Levels 5-15 are probably the most frustrating part of the whole game. Gear sucks, everything respawns way too fast, and you don't have many abilities to choose from to get yourself out of trouble.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[ichigo 2.0]

It won't make some of the extremely long low level dungeons themselves fun though. Hopefully this is remedied in the next expansion.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[AutumnLeaf]

If you like leveling characters, then they sped up the treadmill. But the truth is, WoW is two games.

1) Life before 80 (leveling the character)
2) Life after 80 (leveling gear).

They are really two completely different games, and most people want to play the 2nd one and try different classes. Blizzard is figuring out that World of Warcraft is also the World of Alting.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[ichigo 2.0]

Like the other poster mentioned the badge system has been expanded upon since 3.2, you now get emblems in 5mans that can be used to buy items of the previous tier which means that you can pretty much start raiding the newest raid after gearing up in 5mans. Also, you don't need BIS to be able to raid, a player who knows his rotations and doesn't stand in fires will easily outdps someone who just runs around in epics with no knowledge of their class.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[painandgreed]

What do you mean slightly? You can purchase tier 9 items for every slot of your character with badges.

Even though you can get badges, you still have to grind the same dungeons to get enough badges for all your gear. I think he is looking for a situation where you are able to get all your gear without having to duplicate runs on instances.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Genocaust]

What do you mean slightly? You can purchase tier 9 items for every slot of your character with badges.

Even though you can get badges, you still have to grind the same dungeons to get enough badges for all your gear. I think he is looking for a situation where you are able to get all your gear without having to duplicate runs on instances.

Correct. I like to experience content, and certainly more than "once only" as you won't absorb every minute detail of a dungeon in one run, but after 10 or 15 times of successfully clearing the entire place with no effort the repetition is quite old.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Genocaust]

That's the difference between wanting to belong to a progression guild or not.

From Vanilla until WotLK I was in a top progression guild on my server. That WAS fun. Until we cleared everything (easily, mind you, not just the "yay first kill"). Then it was a repetitive grind to collect BIS items while waiting on new content or farming up gear for people's alts. At least with leveling I get to experience the differences of each class once through the whole process, so it feels like a (fairly) new adventure each time.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Prien715]

I agree with you that making organization easier is good, but think the stat simplification falls into the same line. I want to play WoW, not John from accounting's Glorious Spreadsheet Simulator 2010. If spirit gives everyone MP5 regardless of gearing so much the better. Go is simple, but no one complains it's not hard enough. I'm tired of keeping 4 sets of gear for my raiding druid (caster/healer/feral tank/feral damage) anyway.

I really love the new dungeons in the heroic upgrade. WoW for me is not a "lifestyle"...if I've got an hour to kill and I want to run a dungeon, why not? And yes, the heroics are too easy/boring..except the new ones which I like. The only problem is when you can only raid once a week, how are you supposed to get to ToC25? (I've been raiding for the past month, and have gotten 2 drops...both for off-spec.) And it is class specific. It's very easy to find cloth DPS or plate tank gear. Leather casting gear? Oh do you mean the DPS or the healer kind?

I'd like to see them further simplify things. There's already some items you can buy that are just item level 245 plate gear (your choice). But that's me. Oh, and can I do the difficult raiding content every day so I can practice? Thanks;)

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[mknutty]

Correct. I like to experience content, and certainly more than "once only" as you won't absorb every minute detail of a dungeon in one run, but after 10 or 15 times of successfully clearing the entire place with no effort the repetition is quite old.

It's worth pointing out that there are as many level 80 dungeons+raids as there are level 1-60 dungeons put together. And something like Naxx or Ulduar is about three or four times longer than even the biggest level 1-60 instances. And that's not even counting the fact that since raiding (and even heroic dungeoning) is so much harder than any level 1-60 content, it will almost certainly take many tries before you really truly learn the fights and progress to the content past them. If you are redoing an instance 10-15 times at level 80, either you aren't making an effort to try new things, or you've already been at that level a loooooong, loooooong time.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[AK Marc]

What do you mean slightly?

That he doesn't have to grind the same instance for the one piece of gear, but he still has to grind a small set of instances (well, we can argue about whether the number of instances that can be set to heroic-80 is small, but it certainly is finite). There is no new content, and the equipment comes from running one instance repeatedly, or a set of them repeatedly.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[AK Marc]

You can purchase tier 9 items for every slot of your character with badges.

Oh, and I forgot to add why badges exist. It wasn't so that people could gear up without ever entering a raid (though that was a side effect and something they didn't mind), but that it prevented you from having to grind the same instance 1,000 times for that last piece you never got to drop. You run it 10 times (or whatever) and enough badges would drop you could buy it anyway. It was a mechanism to keep the hardcore from having statistics frustrate them. The 100% chance of a badge on boss kill beats the 5% chance that the dead boss will drop their piece, even if they have to kill 50 or so bosses to get the piece.

That was the complaint that they were fixing, to keep the hardcore happy, and realized later it makes it easier to gear up for the casual dungeon runner, and they liked that idea too (and have expanded badges since their introduction because of the second reason, but that wasn't the reason the program was started).

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[scot4875]

I have to disagree with you on the simplification of stats, and to expand on what Prien715 says.

The multitude of stats and their interaction, and their impact on your performance is just ridiculous. As a caster, in addition to the base stats which I can pretty much ignore, I have hit, crit, spellpower, haste, and mp5. Each talent and skill has slightly different modifiers and coefficients for some of these stats. There's no way, using the stock UI, to actually see what a particular stat will do for you, as spell tooltips don't reflect all of your bonuses (they have made improvements, but information is still missing). So there's no way to actually figure things out without running it through a calculator and a spreadsheet. Now consider that you have more than a dozen slots to optimize, and potentially several pieces of gear to choose from for each slot ... who wants to spend all that time to figure out an optimal set-up?

What's that, you say? Just plug your gear into Rawr and do what it tells you? Well if you're going to do that, then you just subverted the whole "difficulty" thing you said you wanted by letting someone else do the work for you. The fact that Rawr exists at all is a pretty good indicator that the stats system is just too opaque for people who don't have time to spend to take statistically significant samples of their performance using different gear combinations on the target dummies. (Oh, and I hope you're not using a damage meter either, what's the challenge there? You're also not using stock specs/rotations, because what's the challenge there?)

It's even worse on my tank. I have defense, dodge, block, parry, expertise. But each one of these is subject to either diminishing returns or a hard cap -- and on top of that, the tooltips you get don't tell you what your effective avoidance rate is. Without some other tool/spreadsheet/whatever, there's no way to tell what stat is actually better for you. (well, this trinket has 120 dodge on it, but is it going to be subject to more diminishing returns than this one that has only 98 parry?) Then there's also stamina, which most tanks load up on because they just like to be a mana sponge for their healer. Tanking is even worse to try to gather performance data on, because well, you can only do it if you're actually tanking a raid boss.

That said, I don't mind juggling stats in most games. What I do mind is the stupid system that Blizzard has put in place that's nearly impossible to decipher. It's one thing to say, "this item has 100 spellpower, so it will do X to my spells." It's another thing entirely to have to figure out, "this item has 100 spellpower. Arcane missiles is a 5 second base cast, so its coefficient will be Y. Fireball's coefficient will be Z. Frostbolt's coefficient will be W. Oh, but I also have talents that modify the base coefficient for this school, so Frostbolt's will be W+Q. Or is it W*Q? The tooltip isn't really clear. Flamestrike has a 2.5 second cast time, but then it has a DoT component ... what's the coefficient for the DoT effect? Oh, and how does the AoE damage cap work in this patch? Oh fuck it, I'll just go look up Rawr and press 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2 like everyone in the forums tells me to."

--Jeremy

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Rakarra]

Well, in some cases the game is getting "easier," but many of the things you mentioned don't fall into the category of "easy" versus "hard" and more "annoying" versus "non-annoying." Any party member may mark targets -- there was really little reason not to allow this in the first place. As the MT, I always had to ask for leadership to mark targets because in a 5-man you can't designate an assistant. Well now that limitation is gone. It's not 'making it easier,' it's removing an entirely artificial interface mechanic. To put it another way, these things that are being removed didn't make the gameplay itself any harder or easier, it makes administration easier. I would say the game is really not much easier than it was during the level 60 days, but it definitely is easier from the -administration- side. Things like being able to summon inside instances, summoning stones, warlock summoning portals, removing summon stone character level, these are all changes that make the administrative side easier, and most of these were introduced slowly.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Thuktun]

They're trying to cater more and more towards the ADHD kids

Or perhaps adults who have day jobs and can't invest entire days playing the game.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Knara]

Back in the day, DAoC (iirc, anyway) did a thing about midway through its popular life where once you got a Lvl 70 character, you could roll a new character that started at 50 of any class. That was a very, very welcome feature.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[AK Marc]

It would have been nicer if they could just not do the equipment damage penalty if you die as a result of falling during PvP but I imagine that fix would be harder to make, and they almost always do the easy fix.

They manage to sort out if you were killed in PvP you don't get the penalty, and if you weren't you do get it. If they just made a hidden timer of, say, 1 minute where if you were hit by anything PvP related, you wouldn't get a damage penalty when you die, regardless of what caused your actual death, then I think that would work. They already have timers for PvP related activities, just add one more for being the recipient, rather than the instigator.

But I agree that just making people harder to dismount fixes it as well. And some people were complaining for years about the druids. Nothing's nicer than an instant cast flight form that you can't be dazed or knocked out of and can even do quests in for the swoop, loot, fly off that won't aggro those around you. This just closes the gap a hair with what one class already has.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[kiddygrinder]

If you want a challenge you're supposed to be doing hard modes at 80, leveling in wow has *never* been hard.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[ajs]

Knockbacks no longer dismount players

This mechanic never made the game hard. Removing it won't make it easy. What they've done is made an annoying mechanic go away.

To use any Meeting Stone, it is only required that the character's minimum level be 15. There is no maximum character level requirement for any Meeting Stone.

That's right, and guess why they did that. Literally thousands of people complained when they added seasonal events in low-level dungeons and people couldn't summon their level-80 friends to fight a level-80 boss because they were higher than level 40. Easy had nothing to do with it. Intended use being broken was what it had to do with. It's also true that there are dozens of cases where you legitimately have a player summoning who out-ranks the instance. There's no reason to deny them.

However, clearly power-levelers will benefit from that, and I for one see no problem there. Power-leveling, twinking, leveling only through instances, and many other modes of play are all perfectly reasonable things to do.

Creatures attacking a player from behind can no longer cause players level 1-5 to be dazed, and have a reduced chance to cause players level 6-10 to be dazed

Given that levels 1-10 go by in a night for nearly all players, this simply represents the opportunity to ease into the game. It's no easier really (if you were going to die, you probably still will).

These regeneration rates have been increased by up to 200% for low level characters.

This is a change that I seriously approve of. Blizzard finally noticed that all low-level characters were required to melee, even those who, after level 10, would be fools to ever do so again (mage, lock, priest). There was no point in breaking low-level characters like this, so now they don't even get auto-attack on their bar, and spells are intended to be their only low-level tool until they get a wand.

Any party member may mark targets

What the heck?! You think allowing non-leaders to mark somehow makes the game "easier"?! Pass the doobie, I wanna try some of that stuff ;-)

So their aim seems to be to get players to level up faster...

They've increased leveling speed several times and will continue to do so. They're essentially taking the time it took to get from level 1 to ready-to-raid in the original game and continuing to try to make the pre-end-game take that long. To do so, they've sped up many aspects of leveling and max-level, pre-raid gear grinding. None of this makes it any easier, since you still have to spend the same amount of time overall, and still have to learn the same things.

but I feel that's taking away some of the fun of the game.

On the contrary, I suspect you really feel that the new players aren't having to suffer through some of the things you found distasteful like asking someone to pass leader so you could mark and having to melee at level 1. Shucks.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Anonymous Coward]

New feature they should add.

Random Character for Leveling --- For players who like leveling.
and
Random Max Level Characters for End Game --- For players who like end game.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[The Snowman]

Then 60-70 was nerfed shortly before Lich King hit.

I have heard this several times, but never seen it in any of the patch notes -- do you know which patch?

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a day job, and I had ample time in the evenings to do 10 and 25 man raiding. Easily. You can split the raids over an entire week!

Having a job is not an excuse for not playing WoW enough to get good at it, and then complain that you don't have the best gear.

You don't even need to invest that much time into WoW any more, because of pricks like you who whine about the time requirement, when it wasn't even that high to start with! Go play Aion, and then come back and complain some more eh?

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[ahabswhale]

True. EQ was totally brutal but when my guild accomplished something there was real elation there. I never felt anything close to that in WoW. I will say that I never like multi-hour corpse runs cuz the server dropped half your clerics in the middle of a raid but I guess that contributed to the feeling when you were victorious. It's sad to here they nerfed it.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Genocaust]

If you are redoing an instance 10-15 times at level 80, either you aren't making an effort to try new things, or you've already been at that level a loooooong, loooooong time.

I suppose it's worth pointing out that my comments were not strictly pointed towards instances, but also raids. Once you clear something like Naxx or Uld 15+ times, you wouldn't agree it's the least bit repetitive?

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[camazotz]

Yes, this here. I think they've noticed that they gain the most money from the people who play only a few hours a week or month, but over a very long time, as opposed to the players who blast through thirty+ hours a week and burn out after six months to a year and complain about lack of content, dumbing it down, etc. I've been playing since Feb. 2005 and am just now hitting level 78 on my main. This makes me a favored customer, I suspect....I get less "bang for my buck" than the guy who has four 80s after six months, but unlike him, I've still got loads of material yet to be discovered in the game, which I can enjoy with the 4-8 hours a week I actually have time to play the game. I may not have the volume of experience in the game a hardcore WoWer does, but the quality of my time is more appreciated, since I have less of it and therefore need to make it count. Blizzard knows this, and every change they've made makes the play experience more engaging and productive for players like myself who have real jobs and real commitments outside of the game.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[camazotz]

Plus, the majority of their player base are now probably experienced MMOers, so the tedium of pushing through those early levels can be daunting to someone whose done it many times before. If they're new players, the challenge will still be there; I'm sure an occasional newbie comes along who gets confused at things like what WASD is, for example....they've got plenty of additional obstacles to overcome on top of learning the game basics. So either way, I think these changes will work out to appease bored vets rolling new alts and brand new players unfamiliar with the genre (odd as that may seem).

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[bckrispi]

What's wrong with the low-level dungeons? Ragefire Chasm, Shadowfang Keep, and Wailing Caverns are a blast.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[bckrispi]

Heirloom gear really helps mitigate this. Once you have one toon that reaches 80, you can buy bind-on-account gear that scales with level which gives characters a 10% bonus to all experience gained.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[bckrispi]

The meeting stone level requirement is effectively a nod toward boosting - given that low levels go past so quickly now, it's actually quite difficult to find a proper party for a mid level dungeon like maraudon, uldaman or that sort of thing. I guess Blizzard think it better that a new player get boosted through there, rather than miss it altogether.

I leveled my first character this summer. I didn't have much trouble finding groups for mid-level runs. It was just a matter of doing a 'who' for all characters in my level range and whispering an LFG request to them. It took time but it was doable. What was damn near impossible was finding groups for classic lv 58-60 instances & Burning Crusade 68-70. I needed a guildie to run me through Scholomace, Stratholme, and Dire Maul. Half the BC instances I've never even seen. The random dungeon feature could help mitigate this.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[bckrispi]

To WoW developers, adding grind is upping the difficulty...you know, instead of doing something like add strategy to a game that's designed around a bunch of people in a group all hitting their attack button at the same time.

Mmmkay... how about you try button mashing your way through Ulduar or Trial of the Crusader. Let me know how that works out for you. "Tank & Spank" raid bosses in Lich King end with Patchwerk. If you don't know the exact strategy for a boss with your class, you'll not only die, but probably take out the rest of the raid with you.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[ichigo 2.0]

Some of them are far too large (e.g. WC, Maraudon) and take a long time even with a max level character due to the distances involved (not to mention getting lost!). Better design of their layout would help. On the other hand SFK is very nice and I look forward to its HC version.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Fross]

Good point, and it would be good if it was so - I think it would still be hard. When I played a year-18 months ago, and was levelling alts, I often couldn't find a single person who wanted to do some of the more obscure ones, for hours on end - Razorfen, anyone?

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[Fross]

I remember, before TBC came out, trying to level alts to 5 in under 1 hour. That wasn't too hard, I got it down to about 40 minutes then. Last new character I made was a blood elf, and while I didn't stick around to 10, it was a lot quicker, I remember noticing.

This is a pity as a lot of the early quests, area atmospheres and monsters set the scene for the next progressions. The difference between each starter set, in every race on every faction, made for compelling play and in my opinion was the best part of the game in many cases. It's certainly what held people's interest while they got hooked, so it had to have been doing something right. It'll be a pity to miss that great experience.

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[awpti]

They aren't hardly catering to ADHD kids.

http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001365.php ( Average age of WoW player = 28.3 )

Re:They're making the game far too easy

[ITTechN00b]

2800 gearscores? you're f**kin' crazy dude

Would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

If it all worked correctly....but such is the first week of patches.

God be praised!

[Anonymous Coward]

I won't have to listen to the Crusader's Coliseum NPC dialogue again.

WoW players will know what I mean. It's always exactly the same, and after the 100000th time, it's REALLY annoying. Especially "Thankyou high lord! I will now begin the ritual of summoning!" and the really hammy voice acting that follows "You summon a demon lord against warriors of the Horde?"

It's so bad, it makes me wish for "In the mountains... / Thorin, my lord! Why else would these invaders come into your sanctum but to slay you? They must be stopped!"

may take months to face Arthas?

[Kierthos]

Months, huh? I call bullshit. Some guild with no life will beat Arthas into paste before the end of the year.

Every time Blizzard has released new content, one of the mega-guilds powers through it so fast, that it's shocking. Yeah, they might get slapped around the first few times while they learn the encounter.... but you can expect the first Arthas kill in a matter of weeks, not months.

The only possible things that could put it off until the new year is (1) Blizzard hard coded it so each wing is opened on a set schedule, regardless of how fast the bosses in that wing are beaten and (2) Christmas break.

Re:may take months to face Arthas?

[Anonymous Coward]

It will take months because Arthas will not be released for months yet.
This patch is only the first wing of the instance. The next wing is in 28 days. (There is a NPC in the instance that tells you the time until "the door opens")
At this rate, Arthas won't be available until April.

Re:may take months to face Arthas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that the doors to the raid wings are not all open yet. They're on a timer, so the second wing is giong to open in 28 days. Then the 3rd wing will open some days (maybe 28 but probably less) after that.

Guilds will still power through the wings, but we won't see Arthas killed this year as they'll have to wait between each wing.

Re:may take months to face Arthas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Arthas won't be released in a few weeks so I highly doubt what you say is true. Read up before you spread your lies and bullshit.

Re:may take months to face Arthas?

[LanMan04]

Well, remember how long it took to get the AQ gates open? Is this of similar difficulty?

Re:may take months to face Arthas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Blizzard has already stated that they will be staggering the opening of the wings of the final raid dungeon so that there will be several weeks between different sets of bosses becoming available. As far as I know, they haven't provided any kind of set schedule for it; 'several weeks' is as specific as it has gotten thus far.

Re:may take months to face Arthas?

[mooglez]

Months, huh? I call bullshit. Some guild with no life will beat Arthas into paste before the end of the year.

The only possible things that could put it off until the new year is (1) Blizzard hard coded it so each wing is opened on a set schedule, regardless of how fast the bosses in that wing are beaten and (2) Christmas break.

Which is exactly what Blizzard did.
The first wing opened now, the next wing will open 28 days from now. There are a total of 4 wings, and you need to complete ICC on normal mode before you can do hard modes.

Re:may take months to face Arthas?

[renrutal]

It will take months to face the Lich King because the last wing of the Icecrown Citadel raid will only be released some 12 weeks from now.

For example, the second wing, The Plagueworks, is going to open in 4 weeks from now.

Re:may take months to face Arthas?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only possible things that could put it off until the new year is (1) Blizzard hard coded it so each wing is opened on a set schedule, regardless of how fast the bosses in that wing are beaten

That's exactly what they've done. Currently only the first four bosses are open. The next wing opens in 28 days.

Meeting stones

[Mashiki]

Level on meeting stones was stupid. Nothing like going to run a newbie through a lower level dungeon for some leveling gear, only to get there when you're 70 or 80 and get a "you can't use that stone, only for levels 40-50".

Lack of daze from 1-5 just makes sense, you're trying to stroke that skinner box.

Re:Meeting stones

[WuphonsReach]

Level on meeting stones was stupid. Nothing like going to run a newbie through a lower level dungeon for some leveling gear, only to get there when you're 70 or 80 and get a "you can't use that stone, only for levels 40-50".

The meeting stones made a lot of sense back when they were introduced. The ranges were generous, and higher level folks have fast mounts to get around.

The problem came when they streamlined the dungeons so that instead of the mobs having up to 6 or 7 levels of variation, all the mob levels were compressed down to about 2-3 levels. At the same time, they tightened up the meeting stone level requirements. So a stone that you could've used before if you were slightly out of range was no longer useful. That was truly annoying.

The balanced and fair response would've been to slightly widen the stone's level range at the lower end (so you could be up to 5 levels lower then the dungeon) but to not put an upper level cap on using the stone. Therefore upper level players would be able to use the stones, but you wouldn't be able to abuse the stones to summon a level 15 player to the northern edge of Northrend (where they really have no business being).

Instead, they took the lazy way out and made all meeting stones identical. Which means that WoW takes yet another step down the road towards blandless geography, where one location is no better/different then another.

A world with trivial travel requirements is ultimately boring. It's darned convenient, but you lose a lot of the atmosphere of having a virtual fantasy world.

WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a lot of people who seem relatively uninformed, are basing their statements in some variety of hearsay, and/or their experiences on a patch day. I've been playing WoW on and off for 3 years. The experience can be a mixed one, it is certain (as all things in life). However, I can assuredly state that this is one of the most well designed games I've played. The changes being made (faster leveling, obtaining gear being made easier) are designed to increase the appeal to casual players (which I don't at all see as a bad thing), and allow them a sense of achievement with relatively little playtime. This in no way prevents one from "min/maxing" their characters with harder modes, etc... The challenge in this game is alive and well for those who chose to go after it (corpse run lol).
Whether or not any individual thinks WoW is a good game is subjective... however from my personal experience, and the continuing success of a game more than 5 years old, I'm inclined to say that WoW is a quality product (despite patch day bugs: black screen of death anyone?), with huge amounts of appealing content for a variety of different kinds of users.
That is all.

Trade with other players?

[WeirdCat]

Is it possible to trade with players from other realms via this cross-realm instances? Possibly players could even schedule a meeting in the lesser frequented instances.

Re:Trade with other players?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Re:Trade with other players?

[borizz]

I think (haven't tried it) you can only trade stuff that dropped in that instance and has the blue "This item can be traded for 2 hours" text in its tooltip.

Re:Trade with other players?

[bFusion]

You can only trade items that you picked up INSIDE the cross-realm instances. Other items cannot be traded.

Re:Trade with other players?

[mooglez]

Is it possible to trade with players from other realms via this cross-realm instances? Possibly players could even schedule a meeting in the lesser frequented instances.

only conjured items and items that drop during the dungeon can be traded via players from different realms

Re:Trade with other players?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a mage in a cross server dungeon summon me some water. I died and my water was gone when i rezzed. No biggie really.

Also, I accidentally zoned out of the instance and ended up where i joined the group (Stormwind). I right clicked the Green LFG icon on my may and poof, I was back in. That could be handy for repairs.

It was very handy and the other players were well behaved and it took like 2 minutes for a full group.

Great work Blizzard!

Re:Trade with other players?

[borizz]

Not entirely true. Just did a Coilfang dungeon (outland) on my 63 warrior, and some draenic water dropped. I couldn't give it to the healer who was from another realm.

Re:Trade with other players?

[bFusion]

Oh? I was just going off the patch notes, I don't have any experience with it yet. I must have read them wrong then.

Re:Trade with other players?

[PhilHibbs]

Conjured items and instance loot can be traded. Not sure if that extends to white and grey trash loot, or just stuff that is rolled on.

Re:Trade with other players?

[skeeto]

I managed to throw a leather ball to someone on another realm and get got to keep it, so you can do more than just send conjured items and dungeon drops.

Re:Trade with other players?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Only 'conjured' items (mage food) can be traded. It would bring up some interesting opportunities for cross-server arbitrage if you could as different servers can have wide disparities in prices for some items.

Re:Trade with other players?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Cross realm trades only work for conjured items like mana strudels, just like in the battlegrounds. I try to avoid them because I heard they are full of trans fats.

Re:Trade with other players?

[praxis]

Only conjured items and *gear* that has the blue 2 hour trade attribute can be traded, not grays or other items.

Re:Trade with other players?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Only conjured goods and items dropped in the instance can be traded cross-realm.

Re:Trade with other players?

[viruswatts]

Is it possible to trade with players from other realms via this cross-realm instances? Possibly players could even schedule a meeting in the lesser frequented instances.

Outside of conjured? No.

Only conjured items and loot dropped in a dungeon for which other party members are eligible can be traded between players from different realms.

The EvE vs WoW Debate

[lazarus]

As usual the answer is not as straightforward as you might think, and judging by the posts on this thread nobody seems to know how EvE really works.

The "sandbox" aspect of EvE where everyone is in everyone else's universe is not actually one giant "realm" as it were. It is actually thousands of individual servers which control and manage distinct areas of the game world. As you move through the universe you actually move from server to server. There are, of course, central servers which need to understand common aspects of the game such as market and pilot information.

This is an architecture that is not shared by WoW in general. I'm not sure how what Blizzard has released with 3.3 differs from a "battleground" except that a "battlegroup" is a pre-defined entity where in this new instance you have no idea where people are going to come from. To me all this sounds like is a BG without a battlegroup.

So in summary:

• WoW: Many isolated worlds connected by queued instances.
• EvE: Distributed single world connected by central database and networking.

So to answer your question, no, EvE would not burn to the ground if even half the number of users tried to use it. But it would require a careful expansion of the known universe to ensure that there was an even distribution of world resources and thus pilots in its space.

Re:The EvE vs WoW Debate

[Anonymous Coward]

> This is an architecture that is not shared by WoW in general

Yes it is, they're called "zones". You think a realm is running on one box? EVE has lots of players on at once, but have you noticed the pace of EVE in general?

Friends

[whoop]

Is there a way to friend someone on another server, so you can do an instance with these specific people, or is it always random people to fill out your group?

Re:Friends

[eXFeLoN]

You can only "group" with people on your server. The open slots in your group are filled off different servers. In essence each of the toons are logging out of their server and logging in with that toon on a server that handles the instance. You have a button on your /lfg /lfr icon (around the mini-map, mine was under another addon) that transports you to the instance. You can transport back out the same way, run repair, then transport back in. When the instance is complete/you log off/leave group, you log back into your normal server in the same spot that you left from.

Re:Friends

[cixelsyd]

I believe this is functionality that Blizzard is later intending to integrate into the new battle.net when they add features to make it more like Steam. AFAIK it is not in-game currently.

Re:Friends

[artemis67]

But if your friends are on a different server, how are you going to use the Meeting Stone to assemble your team? The Meeting Stone doesn't teleport you directly into your instance.

Re:Friends

[PhilHibbs]

Yes, Friend and Ignore lists are expanded and can include other realm characters.

Re:Friends

[whoop]

Right, what I was wondering is if you meet player JoeSchmoe from another server during one instance, can you somehow arrange to run another insteance with that same person? For example, have the matchmaker service prefer people on your friends list, if other-server friends were allowed. It would certainly expand the community aspect of the game to be the entire battlegroup rather than just your one server.

squeezing the players for subscription cash

[blueworm]

Patch 3.3 is Blizzard's big squeeze for subscription cash before the next expansion. Each wing past the first wing of the raid dungeon is locked out on a real-time timer such that the dungeon incrementally opens. What's worse, is the final boss of each wing has an attempt count which also increases linearly as more wings open. All this is to forcefully stop well-coordinated teams of players from beating the dungeon quickly, and I don't just mean in one week. There are guilds out there who are capable of beating this thing in a couple months in about the 50th percentile of raiding guilds, but with the harsh attempt count on the bosses of each wing it will most likely lock these guilds out for more than that, keeping the subscription cash flowing longer than it needs to. To top it all off, hard modes won't be accessible until the whole dungeon is cleared, and when that happens, they're granting all players a buff to their statistics to make it easier to beat the dungeon. That last one is to deliver the psychological feeling of accomplishment to players who would have otherwise ended their subscriptions, in order to make it seem like the game is still fun for them to keep their subscription dollars coming in.

Blizzard has gotten so addicted to the high revenues that they're willing to implement game mechanics based around keeping people subscribing with minimal content updates. As a result, I've cancelled my subscription and I can safely say I won't be returning to Azeroth again -- ever.

Re:squeezing the players for subscription cash

[blueworm]

UIpdate from mmo-champion.com: "The next unlock will happen on January 5th, if each wing is unlocked after a month it means that we won't see Arthas before April but if I had to give my opinion I would say that it will probably be faster than that. The 4 weeks are probably here to let people test the rest of the content without focusing too much on raid instances."

So there you have it folks, they're giving themselves plenty of time to harvest those delicious greenbacks without updating the content at all. If MMOs are supposed to be constantly evolving persistent worlds, WoW now wins the award for consistently stagnant persistent world.

The "other content" they're referring to are the 5-player dungeons, but those will just get toasted by the end of the week.

If you want to remain playing WoW, you might want to consider putting a dent in Blizzard's coffers by cancelling your subscription at least until the new raid zone is fully released on normal difficulty.

Re:squeezing the players for subscription cash

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool story, bro.

Re:squeezing the players for subscription cash

[Vohar]

Good Lord, this was the worst post in the thread. They ADDED NEW CONTENT and you whine about stagnation. They've added new raid zones twice since the expansion released (Ulduar and Trial of Champions), added MORE yesterday, and you're crying that they're stagnating?

From your two posts I can't even tell what it would take to make you happy. It really seems that you're the type to cry no matter what.

Re:squeezing the players for subscription cash

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.

Re:squeezing the players for subscription cash

[Opportunist]

What reason would I have as a hardcore raiding guild to not unsub 'til April collectively?

Re:squeezing the players for subscription cash

[furby076]

Who plays this game, at the higher end of the spectrum, to quit after they beat a dungeon once? Most players, especially at the higher levels, want to complete there sets. So at the higher levels they will play the same dungeon 10, 20, 30, 40...100 times so they get all of their gear...then the random dropped gear or profession training drops, etc. Blizzard can add many incentives to the game to keep players involved that does not require them to restrict the timing of the bosses.

The reason blizzard is adding this timer is because it looks bad when they release a new boss, zone, etc and the 1337 guilds beat it that same night (they were probably practicing on the test server). It's like the players who went from level 60 to 70 in 24 hours. And then did it from 70 to 80. There are always going to be these players. These are the players who hang out on the test servers, have no lives, and figure out what needs to be done then. Once the release comes out BAM they are the first. Nothing wrong with this... but when some server beats the last boss of a new expansion in 24 hours it makes Blizzard look bad. Nobody cares that it's the super guild that gets sponsership, they just see that WoW = ezsauce

Re:squeezing the players for subscription cash

[Rakarra]

If MMOs are supposed to be constantly evolving persistent worlds, WoW now wins the award for consistently stagnant persistent world.

This quote wins the award for most-ill-informed post in the story. If you think WoW is stagnant, you really should look at all the MMOs out there.

Re:squeezing the players for subscription cash

[Anonymous Coward]

That last one is to deliver the psychological feeling of accomplishment to players who would have otherwise ended their subscriptions, in order to make it seem like the game is still fun for them to keep their subscription dollars coming in.

They can't trick you into thinking a game is fun. They don't add stuff that SEEMS fun but is REALLY boring; that's not possible. More likely, it's boring for you and fun for others. They're probably having to perform a balancing act, and the weighted sweet spot for player enjoyment is moving away from you.

(Posted anonymously because slashdot's web 2.0 nonsense only lets me log in on one of my machines, and it's not this one.)

Re:squeezing the players for subscription cash

[RivenAleem]

The one month timer for the opening of the first gate was only because of the holidays. The remaining gates will open faster.

Every time I get out...

[thesandtiger]

... they pull me back in.

There were 2 things about WoW that made it pale for me over time: Finding dungeon groups as a casual player and the massive quality/functionality disparity between vanilla (Azeroth) and expansion (Burning Crusade & Wrath of the Lich King) areas.

This patch makes it likely that my extremely casual self will be able to find a group - I dislike joining guilds because it feels like there's always going to be drama over the whole casual vs. raider mentality. Not only that, but even in a guild, unless it's a really big one, it's still hard to find groups. Here now I'll be able to just join Pick Up Groups and do stuff. Woo!

The expansion that is coming out - from what I've read they are COMPLETELY redoing the original world to make it more integrated with everything else, higher quality, all that stuff. It will be interesting to see how it works out.

Anyway, they just got me to renew for 3 months - I stopped playing a while back - oy.

Re:Every time I get out...

[borizz]

Yes it's great. I just got a dungeon for my 63 toon in about 2 minutes on an afternoon. Previously I had to wait in LFG and trade channels to find 5 man able to clear that, and that took about 30 minutes on an evening (when more people are on).

Re:Every time I get out...

[furby076]

Finding a good casual guild is hard, but not impossible. I was part of a guild, The Incredibles, on Boulderfist. This guild was always in the top 3 guilds for progression on the server, and eventually became the number 1 guild. What happend to the other 2 guilds? They collapsed on themselves. One of them only ever had 50 players TOPs. They were the 1337 guild. When 25 man raids came out they condensed to 30 players (and obviously 20 players got pissed). Then a couple of key players quit and the guild collapsed, tried to reform under a different name, and fell apart again. The hardcore guilds are pretty tough to be in because of the time commitment. You gotta be willing to play 7 days a week of 8 hour/day raiding, and your off day being to farm resources. That is tough for anyone. The other guild also fell apart when a couple of key players quit. The guild I was in....casual guild. You can join to raid, you can join to pvp, you can join to be casual. You were given a designation - and that gave you certain responsibilities and priorities. You were a pvp designee (because thats what you want to do) - you were given priority into the pvp groups. YOu were also expected to show up. Same goes for PVE. Casual people could log in and just hang out and chat. If a pvp or raid group needed an extra player they were welcome to join - but not required to join. Obviously if you signed up for a raid (pve/pvp) you were required to honor your committment to the group. We had many players who came once a week to raid (because that is all they could). They were consistantly on time and worked well. The Incredibles on Boulderfist is the oldest alliance guild there (since two months after WoW came out) and is one of the top progression guilds. Their membership is in the hundreds.

So it's not impossible to find a good guild that can accomodate EVERYONEs play style.

Re:Every time I get out...

[camazotz]

... they pull me back in.

There were 2 things about WoW that made it pale for me over time: Finding dungeon groups as a casual player and the massive quality/functionality disparity between vanilla (Azeroth) and expansion (Burning Crusade & Wrath of the Lich King) areas.

This patch makes it likely that my extremely casual self will be able to find a group - I dislike joining guilds because it feels like there's always going to be drama over the whole casual vs. raider mentality. Not only that, but even in a guild, unless it's a really big one, it's still hard to find groups. Here now I'll be able to just join Pick Up Groups and do stuff. Woo!

The expansion that is coming out - from what I've read they are COMPLETELY redoing the original world to make it more integrated with everything else, higher quality, all that stuff. It will be interesting to see how it works out.

Anyway, they just got me to renew for 3 months - I stopped playing a while back - oy.

Same here! In the last year I'd been in instances 3 times; I simply didn't have the 1-2 hours needed to get in to a group, including pacifying the organizer/guild that I could handle it with my casual player gear, that I could do DPS as an arms spec warrior because I don't like prot spec tanking (too stressful to be fun) and so forth. So I'd gotten lucky months ago and seen the inside of Nexus a few times....otherwise I mostly quest level and play the AH minigame. Suddenly, random dungeons is active, and in one night I do five instances I've never seen before....get in queue, and five minutes later BAM I'm in a group and we're knocking out a cool instance. This change has literally made WoW a new game to me.....it's really amazing.

I used it last night.

[eXFeLoN]

2 instances failed from the beginning. The next 5 went pretty flawlessly. It will definitely aid the casual player in progression. More so than running ToC over and over to get gear for alts... I like it, I think the same concept should apply in the rest of the game as well. Imagine playing with 10,000,000 ret pally's at the same time.

15 minute lockouts and no solution

[Satanboy]

On my server currently, if a person uses the new looking for group tool to get a random instance, there is an error where you get "too many instances are running try again". Well this locks you out of using the random LFG tool for 15 minutes and you don't get into the instance.

Once you leave group, you get a 15 minute debuff preventing you from getting into another group.

I hope you all can see where this is going.

It has made the game unplayable. I'm buying an FPS and just playing that for a week or two, there's no point to even trying to log onto WoW until they fix this.

Re:15 minute lockouts and no solution

[MisterZimbu]

By "try again" they mean "try teleporting to the instance again".

There's an icon in the lower left corner of the minimap that you can click to try teleporting to the dungeon again. No need to drop group and look again.

Re:15 minute lockouts and no solution

[Anonymous Coward]

lol they are still forcing people to use the LFG tool? For me, the advent of the LFG tool replacing a LFG channel (that could be turned off and on at will by the user) and them subsequently forcing you to be logged into the LFG tool in order to gain access to the channel was a significant reason why I no longer play.

I didn't mind PUGs, but PUG building became pretty tedious when the LFG channel became opt-in, rather than opt-out.

Now they have added a debuff when you leave a group? LOL.. one of my complaints about the tool at the time was that you couldn't be questing with a bud while queuing yourself for something or simply being grouped for quick /g chat (/r always gets confusing with multiple people).

Sometimes the group I would join didn't even give important information before I arrived in the instance.. (half the instance cleared? WTF thanks for saving me to the instance douches..)

Re:15 minute lockouts and no solution

[MisterZimbu]

One of the major features of the patch was adding a new LFG system that literally makes finding a group trivial. If you're just looking for a random instance, you'll be in a group within minutes. If you're looking for something more specific how long it will take will obviously depend on what instance you're looking for.

The key thing is that it's all automated now - it'll find 4 other people (with correct roles - 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 DPS) and automatically group them together for what they're looking for.

Re:15 minute lockouts and no solution

[pwfffff]

You don't know how this works at all, so please stop posting.

Re:15 minute lockouts and no solution

[Skuld-Chan]

I found a work-around to this - you can all just run into the instance manually (instead of being teleported there) and it seems still work - even with the debuff.

Re:15 minute lockouts and no solution

[Rakarra]

Yeah, it is an issue, but it's a short-term issue.

It's because Blizzard builds their capacity based on normal usage, not on patch-day usage. I think this is just as much an issue with their tendency to bundle up lots of changes into one large content patch rather than stagger them on a more gradual basis.

Re:15 minute lockouts and no solution

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a fix for that:
Log out. Disable whatever map addon you are using. Log in. Click on the green button on the map. Select port to dungeon.

"You have people literally wanting 2800+ "gearscores" to run into a Naxx10 run"

I'm not on your server so I'm just guessing here but achievment runs? Considering you can full clear Toc 10/25 and Uld 10/25 with everyone just under or at 2800 gearscore, if you need it for Naxx that's about the only thing that explains it. Unless people on the server just generally suck.

Re:15 minute lockouts and no solution

[camazotz]

I've not had that problem yet, luckily. We have had an issue where the instance will quit out and the system says it couldn't find the instance....but then you just click on the little eye icon and it offers to teleport you there, which gets things going just fine. Be careful with the FPS you choose. I've been playing MW2 and have had several games rather unexpectedly end when the host server croaks and kicks us out of game and back in to the lobby. The only thing worse than a cool down is being halfway through the game when it dies and you lose everything you had accrued to that point.

So easy it's not even fun anymore.

[El_Furioso]

There's something to be said for making a game challenging. Basically, WoW no longer is. After having taken a nearly year long break, I restarted mostly to test out the performance of my MacBook Pro. (OK, and to get my fix a little) I was dumbfounded by how totally easy the game is now. Leveling is trivial. So much so that that is the only thing people care about. Getting to level 80 and raiding. I've spent entire evening trying to find people to run the classic instances to no avail. And god forbid it take any longer than 30 minutes to do anything before you start hearing, "How much longer." It seems that Blizzard has dumbed down the game to pander to the short-attention-span, I-want-everything-now generation. God forbid kids have to learn how to actually earn something.

Re:So easy it's not even fun anymore.

[pwfffff]

Your idea of a challenge is waiting for pugs to join your group? What the fuck? Go start a quidditch game or something.

Re:So easy it's not even fun anymore.

[furby076]

Go play Warhammer Online. It's PVP oriented but they have been coming out with more high-end instances that requires team work. One place (tomb of the vulture lord) is a 6 man instance that requires a consistant group. It can be cleared out in one night if your group is really good at it...but typically starts out as 3 nights to clear, 2 nights, etc. Once you clear it a world boss appears where you need to get a raid group to defeat the boss. What makes this challenging....while you are fighting the world boss it is very well possible for the opposing faction to pop out and wipe your raid group(s). The raid boss drops an item that allows you to purchase the best items in the game.

Overall the game is geared for PVP but they have been making some good PVE instances (about 5-6 of them). The pvp is superior to WoW by a LOT. For example - being a fully defensive tank is very fun to play...and a class that every PVP group wants.

Re:So easy it's not even fun anymore.

[Reapy]

It's a video game... It is supposed to dispense pellets as rapidly as possible. Have you looked at any game developed in the last, what 10 years? When is the last time you actually had to struggle to beat a game and see the content? I had hordes of nintendo games where I never even saw the last few bosses. If it didn't have a cheat code that was pretty much the end. Even something like mike tyson's punch out, I couldn't even get to macho man, let alone tyson, thank god for the cheat code.

Game design has been refined. Now, you get to play the game and enjoy it. Then, if you want to break your balls trying something hard, they give you the option to do it, either through achievements, alternate game modes opening, or whatever.

Wow continues this design by having easy and hard modes, and surprise, the hard modes...are HARD. Perfect design IMHO.

Looking at this list of changes, sounds to me like they are taking steps to remove long waits to play the game. Are you so hung up on EQ that you thought those late night 4am 'get my corpse before it rots or quit the game' runs were fun? Hey, you really should WORK for those jboots, have fun camping the most boring fucking zone in the world for 18 hours for the quest drop.

Does anybody want that in a game? Why is that even there? We want to get in to a dungeon with people and play the GD game. If you want to play those old instances that most of the player base has been doing over and over for the past 5 years (hence boring, who wants to do that?), congrats, look at the patch notes. Now you can probably queue up for that instance and from a huge pool of players you can find the rare 4 others that want to run the old instance at the proper level. Why is this a bad thing again?

Re:So easy it's not even fun anymore.

[Rakarra]

Blizzard got tired of putting tons of work into high-end instances that only the top one-half of one percent would beat.

So Arthas, the entire focus of this expansion that everyone is playing, would only be seen by a tiny minority of players? They said "fuck that," and it was the right decision to make. You have a regular dungeon for the large player base, and you have hard-modes for people who want a challenge and the greater rewards that come with it.

It'll be nice....when it works

[Anonymous Coward]

I was on for roughly 3 hours last night. Some guildies and I managed to run 1 of the new 5 mans and that was it. The instance servers kept crashing. It probably took a good hour to finish that 1 instance because of the problems. We started the 2nd instance but it froze up on the 1st boss fight and we eventually got booted back to Dalaran. The wife was using the new LFG system and ran 2 or 3 random instances but with the instance servers going up and down, she wasn't happy either.

Now as far as the comments of making WoW too easy, yes it is a lot easier now. I welcome this though because I have 3 80's and 4 other toons coming (74, 73, 52, 38). I like variation and faster leveling combined with easier time getting gear helps my alts out. Having that 1 decked out 80 with all the best gear in the game isn't my thing really. I like to jump around so I don't get completely burned out on one toon. With that said, I do have a "Pve main" and a seperate "Pvp/some pve main" so I get to experience all of WoW's content.

Back in My Day...

[gedrin]

When I first started playing WoW there wasn't any of this fancy "meeting stones" or "looking for group". If you wanted to get people together to play you shouted into random channels in Ironforge. No cross realm ques for battlegrounds and there were no PVP rewards, and we liked it! If you wanted a horse, you saved your money from level one and didn't even THINK of buying anything until you had it, and if you wanted something other than a horse TOO BAD. Everything was better then. Loot meant something and everyone in your group looked out for you and made sure the right people got the right gear. Back in my day Paladins were ineffective but unkillable, shamans were GODS and if you wanted to leave Tarren Mill you WALKED because the flightmaster was DEAD. You think it's hard now? Imagine running MC and hoofing it back to your body in Blackrock, uphill both ways!

Re:Back in My Day...

[daninspokane]

When I first started playing WoW there wasn't any of this fancy "meeting stones" or "looking for group". If you wanted to get people together to play you shouted into random channels in Ironforge. No cross realm ques for battlegrounds and there were no PVP rewards, and we liked it! If you wanted a horse, you saved your money from level one and didn't even THINK of buying anything until you had it, and if you wanted something other than a horse TOO BAD. Everything was better then. Loot meant something and everyone in your group looked out for you and made sure the right people got the right gear. Back in my day Paladins were ineffective but unkillable, shamans were GODS and if you wanted to leave Tarren Mill you WALKED because the flightmaster was DEAD. You think it's hard now? Imagine running MC and hoofing it back to your body in Blackrock, uphill both ways! Now get off my lawn

Fixed that up for you.

Re:Back in My Day...

[Rakarra]

When I first started playing WoW there wasn't any of this fancy "meeting stones" or "looking for group". If you wanted to get people together to play you shouted into random channels in Ironforge. No cross realm ques for battlegrounds and there were no PVP rewards, and we liked it!

I would ask your raid leaders from back then if they really liked having a warlock and two others run back to the instance entrance to summon a latecomer! And if you were in Molten Core, a ton of pointless trash that wasn't tied to any boss had already respawned.

Or ask the mages if it was fun spending a quarter of their mana creating two waters (not two stacks... two waters, 1/10 of a stack), and have to make enough water to give two stacks to the entire raid.

Yeah, from a raid leader perspective.. those were the bad old days.

Re:Back in My Day...

[Trillian_1138]

I'm embarrassed that I haven't played WoW in...how long has it been? Four years. I haven't played WoW in four years and I still understood all that...

Re:Back in My Day...

[camazotz]

I was there. It was fun because we didn't know any better....! Oh by the way, 2004 called and wants its grind back!

Not the introduction of cross-server instances...

[Rakarra]

WoW has had cross-server instances for a few years now -- they're called cross-server battlegrounds. A battleground is really just another instance with different pvp rules.

WoW = WoB

[Eric Eikrem]

World of Borecraft...